by Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has won a coveted contract from NASA to build a space shuttle for manned trips to the moon, the agency’s chief said on Friday. American space.
The move is part of NASA’s Artemis lunar exploration program, which has already awarded SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rival space company, a $3 billion (2.77 billion euros) contract. ) in 2021 to send astronauts to the Moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission in 1972.
The first missions using SpaceX’s Starship system are scheduled for the end of the decade.
Blue Origin’s contract is valued at around $3.4 billion, NASA exploration chief Jim Free said, with Blue Origin contributing privately “well in excess” of that amount, according to the official of Blue Origin’s lunar lander, John Couluris.
Blue Origin did not give many details about its project, except that it named its partners: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, the Draper company, which specializes in software for spacecraft, and the Astrobotic company, which specializes in in robotics.
(Joey Roulette report, Nathan Vifflin, edited by Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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