Bezos' Blue Origin aims to send the first woman to moon for NASA mission 2024

In a cut-throat competition with Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Dynetics to secure the NASA lunar lander contract, Jeff Bezos led space firm Blue Origin on December 5 asserted that it will take the first woman to the Moon in 2024. The Amazon CEO posted a video of an engine test at the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and declared that the engine of the first privately built lander by Blue Origin had a successful test firing time of 1,245 seconds, and was relying to launch a woman on the lunar floor.

"This (BE-7) is the engine that will take the first woman to the surface of the Moon," said Bezos. 

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Blue Origin awarded $579 million contract

The Blue Origin's lander that tallied test-fire time will energy the corporate’s National Team Human Landing System lunar lander. Bezos’ company assisted with the assembling of the Blue Moon lander in 2019 with Lockheed Martin Corp, Northrop Grumman Corp, and Draper and is now in fierce competition with Dynetics, owned by Leidos Holdings Inc, and Space X to win NASA's contract.

NASA, earlier in April, awarded Blue Origin with $579 million along with $135 million for Space X to improve on the lunar lander and the Starship system. Additionally, it awarded $253 million to Leidos-owned Dynetics, however, needs to now select only one of the three Space companies in early March 2021. 

[NASA women astronauts Jessica Meir (left) and Christina Koch are pictured during a spacewalk to finalize upgrading power systems on the International Space Station's Port-6 truss structure. Credit: NASA]

"The BE-7 is a high-performance, additively manufactured liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen lunar landing engine with 10,000 lbf of thrust — deep throttling down to 2,000 lbs for a precise landing on the Moon," Bezos informed, touting the engine booster. "The engine will power Blue Origin’s National Team HLS lunar lander," he added.

If signed, the Blue Origin will send the first woman to the moon under NASA’s Artemis program. Recently, NASA awarded a total of $25,001 contracts to at least four companies to retrieve lunar regolith or moon soil. The soil will be studied by NASA scientists in its Artemis program, which aims to send the next man and a woman to the moon by 2024. "The companies will collect the samples and then provide us with visual evidence and other data that they've been collected," a spokesman for Nasa said in a statement. 

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