Blue Origin · Artemis Program · Amazon · SpaceX · Donald Trump · Elon Musk · The Guardian Technology
Nasa announced on Tuesday ambitious plans for three uncrewed lunar missions this year to kickstart construction of a $20bn moon
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The revelation by Nasa’s administrator, Jared Isaacman, at a press conference in Washington DC marked the first detailed public explanation of how and when the moon base will be built.
Key facts
- Nasa announced on Tuesday ambitious plans for three uncrewed lunar missions this year to kickstart construction of a $20bn moon base, and said it had chosen the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue
- The agency’s “blueprint for an enduring lunar presence” is also laid out on a new Nasa moonbase website launched on Wednesday, which gives a timeframe between 2029 and 2032 for establishing a base
- Blue Origin is competing with SpaceX to provide crew landers for an upcoming sequence of Artemis missions, including the planned 2028 return of humans to the moon on Artemis IV
- Blue Origin suffered a setback last month when a payload from the third flight of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket ended up in the wrong orbit, but was cleared to return to flight by the Federal
Summary
Nasa announced on Tuesday ambitious plans for three uncrewed lunar missions this year to kickstart construction of a $20bn moon base, and said it had chosen the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, ahead of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, to conduct the first. He said the three missions planned for 2026 would be followed by “more than a dozen” more in the coming years to test systems and equipment. “People are looking up again, believing in big things again, and paying attention as America returns to the moon again, and this time to stay,” he said. He added, without mentioning any names, that the agency had been “having the tough conversations with those failing to meet expectations” since the Artemis splashdown on 10 April.