NASA chooses Blue Origin to fly to the Moon after Space X

Two years after awarding the first SpaceX contract, NASA announced on Friday that it has selected US space company Blue Origin to build a second lunar landing system designed to carry astronauts to the lunar surface. Billionaire Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, said he was “honored to be a part of this journey with NASA” this Friday on Twitter.

The lander has been selected for the Artemis 5 mission due in 2029. The contract is valued at $3.4 billion, but John Coulouris, Blue Origin’s vice president in charge of lunar transport, explained during a press conference that the company itself will contribute “much more” than that amount to the vessel’s development. First, he will have to demonstrate his safety by landing on the moon without a crew.

Astronauts on the Moon by 2025?

The Artemis program is the American lunar return program, consisting of missions of increasing complexity. It all started with the Artemis 1 mission, which sent a spacecraft around the moon unmanned last fall. The Artemis 2 mission will send four astronauts around the moon in the fall of 2024 without landing there. Then Artemis 3 will be the first mission to land astronauts on the lunar surface since 1972. It is officially scheduled for the end of 2025, a schedule that many believe will not be met.

The next two missions, Artemis 4 and Artemis 5, will also both land on the Moon, but will first pass through a new space station in lunar orbit that doesn’t exist yet.

In 2021, NASA chose SpaceX to build the Artemis 3 lander. The contract was worth $2.9 billion, even if SpaceX also contributes beyond that amount. Blue Origin, also bidding for this first contract, filed a complaint against NASA, accusing it of choosing one company instead of two as proposed. But the complaint was rejected.