by Joey Roulette
WASHINGTON, May 19 (Reuters) – Blue Origin, the space company of Amazon boss Jeff Bezos, has won a coveted contract from NASA to build a space shuttle to make manned trips to the Moon, the space chief said on Friday. the US space agency.
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 company Draper, specialized in software for spacecraft, and the company Astrobotic, specialized in robotics. (Joey Roulette report, French version Nathan Vifflin, edited by Jean-Stéphane Brosse)
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