![]() Not because NASA had picked SpaceX-SpaceX, by this point, is one of the country’s most reliable space contractors-but because the agency had picked only SpaceX. When NASA announced the winner of the lander contract in April, many in the industry were surprised. Read: Jeff Bezos has picked an unusual space crewĪlthough he loves to pay homage, Bezos wants to play a leading role, to contribute the pieces that will eventually land in museums. The capsule carried enough mementos to fill a museum exhibit: a bronze medallion commemorating the first hot-air-balloon flight, a piece of canvas from the Wright brothers’ famous plane, the goggles Amelia Earhart wore during her flight across the Atlantic. Blue Origin’s vehicles are named for NASA’s pioneering astronauts, and Bezos scheduled his own inaugural spaceflight for the anniversary of Apollo 11’s touchdown. Bezos loves this history-all aerospace history, really. Over the next decade, American astronauts landed on the moon six times. Kennedy had just given his now-famous moon speech, and the agency had to act fast. “The turnaround was relatively quick,” Teasel Muir-Harmony, a historian and curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, told me. NASA solicited proposals for lander technology in July and picked a contractor by November-Grumman, an early iteration of Northrop Grumman, which still builds spacecraft for NASA today. The last time NASA hired someone to build a human landing system for the moon was in 1962. But there are some things money can’t buy, and it turns out that the moon might be one of them. He is the richest person on the planet, with little competition there. He might have enough money to build his own rocket (underwritten, of course, by the contributions of Amazon workers and customers) and fund Blue Origin’s other space-based pursuits indefinitely. A month before that symposium in 2019, Bezos unveiled a mock-up of the lander in a big ballroom in Washington, D.C., and, beaming with confidence, told the audience that the vehicle in front of them was going to the moon.Īs it stands, Bezos won’t get his wish. But suborbital flights are a small piece of Bezos’s space ambitions, which he has described as his “most important work.” Bezos wants Blue Origin to have the honor of delivering American astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. ![]() This might seem like a strange turn for a man who just flew to the edge of space on his own rocket. ![]() Read: Jeff Bezos has reached his final form NASA, which had already started paying SpaceX for the job, now has to put the effort on hold. His space company, Blue Origin, recently filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that NASA’s process for choosing a supplier for its new landing system had “flaws.” According to the company, the process that this year led NASA to pick Elon Musk’s SpaceX over Blue Origin, which partnered with other aerospace contractors for the bid, was not fair. But when Bezos predicted this future two years ago, he probably didn’t imagine that the loser in this scenario would be him. NASA’s pick for the maker of its next lunar lander, for its first missions to the moon since the Apollo days, has already been contested. “Today there would be three protests,” he said, referring to contractors’ appeals of NASA decisions, “and the losers would sue the federal government because they didn’t win.”īezos’s remarks were prescient. Fifty years had passed since that historic achievement, and Bezos marveled at how quickly NASA had once moved to select the manufacturer for its lunar lander. In the summer of 2019, Jeff Bezos appeared at a space symposium marking the anniversary of the first moon landing.
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