New York: Jeff Bezos said his space firm Blue Origin will take the first woman to the moon’s surface, as NASA looks to zero in on its first private lunar landers equipped for sending space travelers to the moon by 2024.
“This is the engine that will take the first woman to the surface of the Moon,” Bezos said in a post on Instagram with a video of the motor test this week at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
The BE-7 motor, which Blue Origin has been creating for quite a long time, has counted 1,245 seconds of test-fire time and will propel the National Team Human Landing System lunar lander.
Blue Origin team of contractors formed in 2019 to help build its Blue Moon lander include Lockheed Martin Corp and Northrop Grumman Corp.
Blue Origin has competed for rewarding government contracts lately and is contending with rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Dynetics, claimed by Leidos Holdings Inc, to win an agreement to assemble NASA’s next human lunar landing framework to ship people to the moon.
In April, NASA granted a lunar lander advancement agreement to Blue Origin’s group worth $579 million, just as two different organizations: SpaceX which got $135 million to help build up its Starship framework and Leidos-possessed Dynetics which won $253 million.
NASA is ready to pick two of the three organizations “toward the beginning of March” 2021 to keep fabricating their lander models for maintained missions to the moon starting in 2024, an office representative has said.
Yet, thin assets for the arrival frameworks made accessible to NASA by Congress, just as vulnerability over the approaching Biden organization’s perspectives on space investigation, have taken steps to postpone NASA’s choice to propel the lunar lander contracts.