Nasa selects Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin for first of three uncrewed lunar missions

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. 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. 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. He said the highly successful Artemis II mission last month that sent four astronauts around the moon for the first time since 1972 had been both a catalyst and incentive to advance the moon base plan. “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. “We are not jumping right into the glass dome moon base. We intend to take an iterative approach, sending a demand signal to industry for a lot of landers and rovers and tech demonstrations, and all the scientific payloads these missions can accommodate,” Isaacman said. …