Today is definitely a big day for Blue Origin and its founder, Jeff Bezos, and not necessarily a bad one, but a bit annoying for Elon Musk, and I’ll explain later why I’m mentioning it in an unavailable story. directly related to him or SpaceX. But to understand everything that is happening, it is necessary to do a little history.
Of the current projects in relation to space, without a doubt NASA’s Artemis program is the most exciting. It is true that the commissioning of the James Webb has been a milestone, and that it has already begun to take place on the replacement for the veteran International Space Station, something also sensational. However, the prospect of returning to the Moon in the short term, and of humans reaching the surface of Mars in the next decade, is nothing short of insurmountable.
When the Artemis project (now program) was launched, during the Trump administration, NASA opened a contest for the participation of private companies in it and, although in the first instance it seemed that they were going to hire two companies, a series of circumstances forced the US space agency to keep only one, and the chosen one was Space X. Blue Origin did not like this decision at all, that he took the scenario of the two contractors for granted, being one of the chosen ones. From that point, the company began a tortuous judicial journey, while Jezz Bezos entered the melee with Elon Musk. A few months later, the legal process ended, leaving Blue Origin out of the program.
However, that this legal process had concluded did not mean that the company’s aspirations had endedsince since then movements have continued to take place aimed at allowing NASA to have a second contractor, a very important measure to guarantee the correct development of the mission, in the event that any type of problem occurs that prevents one from of them complies with the provisions of the contract.
Thus, today these movements have borne fruit and, consequently, NASA has announced that Blue Origin will be its second supplier of the lunar lander, and that its lander will be used on the Artemis V mission., which will be the third of the program in which the human being will step on the Moon again. Let’s remember that Artemis I took place at the end of last year, and that Artemis II is scheduled for November 2024. There is still no date for Artemis III, which will be the return of the human being to the Moon, but it is expected that it can take place sometime in 2025.
With the contracting of Blue Origin, the lunar landing module of Jeff Bezos’s company will be added to that of SpaceX, which will be the one used in Artemis III and Artemis IV, which means that from that moment the US space agency will already have redundancy at this point, something that will undoubtedly be a great improvement for the program. Although, after the unfortunate descent into the mud starring Bezos and Musk, Let’s hope this doesn’t influence the collaboration between both companies.
