Bezos says his Blue Origin will take the first woman to the moon’s surface. Blue Origin heads a “national team” hired and assembled in 2019 to help build its Blue Moon spacecraft.
The BE-7 engine that Blue Origin has been developing for years, recorded 1,245 seconds of testing time and will power the company’s lunar probe National Team Human Landing System.
Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’ space company, will take the first woman to the lunar surface, the billionaire said on Friday, as NASA approaches the decision to choose its first privately built lunar probes capable of sending astronauts to the moon by 2024.
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“BE-7 is the engine which will take the first woman to the surface of the Moon,” said Bezos in an Instagram post bringing a video of the engine test done this week at Marshall Space Flight Center of NASA, at Huntsville, Alabama.
The BE-7 engine, which Blue Origin has been developing for years, recorded 1,245 seconds of testing time and will power the company’s National Team Human Landing System lunar probe.
Blue Origin heads a “national team” hired and assembled in 2019 to help build its Blue Moon rig. This team includes companies like Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.
Blue Origin has contested and won lucrative government contracts in recent years and is competing with billionaire rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Leidos Holdings-owned Dynetics to win a contract to build the next lunar human landing system NASA that will transport humans to the moon in the next decade.
In April, NASA awarded a contract to develop a lunar module for the Blue Origin team worth $ 579 million, as well as two other companies: SpaceX, which received $ 135 million to help develop its Starship system. and Dynetics, which won $ 253 million.
NASA must choose two of the three companies “in early March” in 2021 to continue building its landing prototypes for human-crewed missions to the Moon starting in 2024, an agency spokesman said.
However, the scarce funds earmarked for landing systems made available by Congress to NASA, as well as uncertainty about the next Biden government’s views on space exploration, threaten to delay NASA’s decision to promote lunar lander contracts.