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The place of Jeff Bezos The millionaire said the company, Blue Origin, would take the first woman to the surface of the moon. NASA is set to decide on the first privately built lunar landers capable of sending astronauts to the moon by 2024.
“This (BE-7) is the engine that carried the first woman to the lunar surface,” Bezos said in a post on Instagram during a video of the engine test at the NASA Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama this week. .
The BE-7 engine, which Blue Origin has been developing for years, has increased the test-fire time to 1 245 seconds, which will power the company’s national team human landing system Chandra Lander.
Leads a “national team” to become the main contractor in 2019 to help build the Blue Moon lander. That team also includes Lockheed Martin, Nortrop Gruman and Draper.
Blue Origin has been competing for lucrative government contracts in recent years, and is competing with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Dynamics, a rival owned by Lidos Holdings, to win a contract to build NASA’s next manned lunar landing system to transport humans to the moon in the next decade. .
Jeff Bezos
In April, NASA awarded a lunar lander development contract to the Blue Origin team and two other companies worth $ 579 million: SpaceX, which received $ 135 million to help develop the starship system, and Lidos-owned Dynatics-$ 253 million.
A spokesman for the agency said NASA was ready to select two of the three companies in early March 2021 to continue building lander prototypes for crude missions to the moon from 2024.
Slim funds for landing systems made available to NASA by the US Congress and uncertainty about the incoming Biden administration’s views on space exploration have threatened to delay NASA’s decision to proceed with lunar landing agreements. – Reported by Joy Roulette and Rama Venkat, (c) 2020 Reuters
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