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Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin will take the first woman to the moon, the billionaire said as NASA nears a decision on who will supply its first privately-built lunar landers, believed to be capable of sending astronauts on the moon by 2024.
“This is the engine that will take the first woman to the surface of the moon,” Bezos said in an Instagram post with a video of a BE-7 engine test this week at the Nasa Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
Twelve men walked on the moon, but no women. NASA aims to change this, Administrator Jim Bridenstine said last year the first woman to complete a moon landing would come from the current body of astronauts.
“In the 1960s, young women didn’t have the opportunity to see themselves in this role,” said Bridenstine. “Today they’re doing it, and I think it’s a very exciting opportunity.”
The Blue Origin engine, in development for years, totaled 1,245 seconds of test firing time. It is intended to power the lunar lander of the company’s national team human landing system.
Blue Origin is the prime contractor for a “national team” assembled in 2019 to help build its Blue Moon lander. The team includes Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper.
Bezos’ company has fought over lucrative government contracts. In the race to build NASA’s system for transporting humans to the moon over the next decade, it competes with SpaceX and billionaire rival Elon Musk’s Dynetics, owned by Leidos Holdings.
In April, NASA awarded the Blue Origin team a contract to develop a lunar lander worth $ 579 million. SpaceX has received $ 135 million to help develop its Starship system. Dynetics received $ 253 million.
NASA has announced that it will choose two companies “in early March” 2021, to continue building prototypes of landers for manned missions from 2024.
Slim funds for the landing systems made available to NASA by Congress, along with uncertainty over the Biden administration’s views on space exploration, threatened to delay the decision.
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