2023-05-19 21:14:15
After SpaceX, Blue Origin will also send astronauts to the Moon
NASA announced on Friday that it has chosen the American space company Blue Origin to build a second moon landing system, intended to bring astronauts to the Moon.
The lander has been selected for the Artemis 5 mission, which is due to take place in 2029. It will first have to demonstrate its safety by landing on the Moon without a crew. Billionaire Jeff Bezos, founder of Blue Origin, tweeted Friday that he was “honoured to be part of this journey with NASA.”
The contract is worth $3.4 billion, but John Couluris, vice president of lunar transport at Blue Origin, said at a press conference that the company would itself contribute “well to the beyond” this amount to develop the ship.
The Artemis program is the American return to the Moon program, consisting of missions of increasing difficulty. It started with the Artemis 1 mission, which sent a spacecraft around the moon last fall, unmanned. The Artemis 2 mission will send four astronauts around the Moon in the fall of 2024, without landing there. The identity of the lucky winners, three Americans and a Canadian, was recently revealed.
Artemis 3 will then be the first mission to land astronauts on the lunar surface since 1972. It is officially scheduled for the end of 2025, a schedule which it is widely believed will not be met. The next two missions, Artemis 4 (in 2028) and Artemis 5 (in 2029), will also both land on the Moon, but will first pass through a new space station in lunar orbit, Gateway – which does not yet exist.
Concurrence
In 2021, NASA had chosen SpaceX to build the Artemis 3 lander. The contract amounted to 2.9 billion dollars, even if SpaceX also contributes to the effort beyond this amount. Blue Origin, also in competition for this first contract, had filed a complaint once morest NASA, accusing it of having chosen a single company and not two as it had suggested. But the complaint was dismissed.
In 2022, SpaceX had also been chosen by NASA for the lander of the Artemis 4 mission. At the same time, the American space agency launched a call for tenders for other companies for the continuation of the program.
“We want more competition. We want two landers,” NASA boss Bill Nelson said on Friday. “That means you have more reliability, and a back-up alternative.”
Blue Origin’s lander, dubbed Blue Moon, will be 16 meters tall and weigh 45 tonnes when filled with its fuel – liquid hydrogen and oxygen.
Several companies are partners in the project: Boeing, Draper, Astrobotic, Honeybee Robotics, and Lockheed Martin. The latter will develop a crucial element: a kind of shuttle, responsible for refueling Blue Moon around the Moon. Blue Origin plans to use its New Glenn rocket, which has never flown before, to launch both its lander and this shuttle.
Prelude to Mars
The astronauts will take off aboard the Orion capsule, propelled to the Moon thanks to NASA’s new mega rocket SLS. These two elements were tested empty during Artemis 1, and will be tested with crew during Artemis 2.
For Artemis 3, Orion will dock directly to SpaceX’s lander. Two astronauts will then descend on the Moon for regarding a week (two others will remain on board Orion). Once their experiments are over, the two adventurers will go back in the lander, to Orion, which will bring the four crew members back to Earth.
Subsequently, Orion will attach to the Gateway space station, and the astronauts will pass through it before boarding the SpaceX lander (Artemis 4), or Blue Origin (Artemis 5).
All of these missions target the South Pole of the Moon, where there is water in the form of ice. The goal of the Artemis program is to learn to live on the Moon, in order to test all the technologies necessary for an even more perilous journey: to Mars.
AFP
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