NASA will award awards for delivering cargo to the Moon to Blue Origin and SpaceX

BERLIN — NASA plans to use cargo versions of the Artemis lunar landers being developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX to deliver a pressurized rover and terrestrial habitat to the lunar surface in the early 2030s.

NASA announced it would add the work to existing contracts to develop cargo versions of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon and SpaceX’s Starship to carry payloads to the lunar surface. are working on cargo versions of their Human Landing System (HLS) spacecraft.

NASA said Starship will deliver no earlier than fiscal year 2032 the pressurized rover that Japan’s space agency JAXA is developing under an agreement announced in April. Blue Moon will create habitat on the lunar surface no earlier than fiscal year 2033.

“Based on current progress in the design and development of both crew and cargo landers, as well as the Artemis mission schedules for lander versions, NASA has assigned a pressurized rover mission to SpaceX and a lunar habitat delivery to Blue Origin,” Lisa Watson-Morgan , NASA’s HLS program manager, said in a Nov. 19 statement.

NASA has not disclosed the value of the upcoming awards to the two companies for these missions. In a statement, NASA said it would issue a request for proposals for those missions to the two companies in early 2025, and did not explain why it announced the planned awards months earlier.

The agency also did not disclose why it selected each company for its specific cargo mission. “Having two lunar lander providers with different approaches to crew and cargo landing capabilities provides mission flexibility while ensuring a regular frequency of lunar landings for further discoveries and scientific opportunities,” Steve Creech, NASA associate associate associate administrator for program technical affairs “Moon-Mars”. Department, the message says.

In January, NASA said it had commissioned two companies to begin work on cargo versions of their HLS landers. The agency said at the time that the landers are designed to deliver a minimum of 12 to 15 metric tons to the lunar surface, much larger than the robotic landers the agency is using in its current commercial lunar payload services program to deliver payloads for science and technology demonstrations.

NASA said in January that initial work on cargo versions of Blue Moon and Starship would be conducted under existing HLS awards and would not require additional funding.

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