Bezos' space company will take the first woman to moon's surface | Flash News
Bezos' space company will take the first woman to moon's surface
In April, NASA awarded the team at Blue Origin a lunar lander development contract worth $ 579 million.
Jeff Bezos' space company Blue Origin will take the first woman to the surface of the moon, the billionaire said on Friday as NASA nears a decision to choose its first privately-built lunar landers capable of sending astronauts on the moon by 2024.
“This (BE-7) is the engine that will take the first woman to the surface of the moon,” Bezos said in an Instagram post with video of the engine test this week at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. . .
The BE-7 engine, which Blue Origin has been developing for years, has totaled 1,245 seconds of firing test time and will power the lunar lander of the company's national team human landing system.
Blue Origin is leading a "national team" as prime contractor which they assembled in 2019 to help build their Blue Moon lander. This team includes Lockheed Martin Corp, Northrop Grumman Corp and Draper.
Blue Origin has competed for lucrative government contracts in recent years and is competing with billionaire rival Elon Musk's SpaceX and Dynetics, owned by Leidos Holdings Inc, to win a contract to build NASA's next human lunar landing system for transport humans to the moon in the next one. decade.
In April, NASA awarded a lunar lander development contract to the team at Blue Origin worth $ 579 million, along with two other companies: SpaceX which received $ 135 million to help to develop its Starship and Dynetics system, owned by Leidos, which won $ 253 million.
NASA is set to choose two of the three companies "in early March" 2021 to continue building their prototypes of landers for manned missions to the moon from 2024, a spokesperson for the agency said.
But slim funds for landing systems made available to NASA by Congress, along with uncertainty over the Biden administration's views on space exploration, threatened to delay NASA's decision. to advance the contracts of the lunar landers.
Source:- Flash News and News Agencies