Today is definitely a big day for Blue Origin and its founder Jeff Bezos, and not necessarily a bad one, but a little annoying for Elon Musk, and I’ll explain why I’m mentioning it in an unavailable story later. him or SpaceX. But to understand everything that is happening, it is necessary to do a little history.

Of the current projects in relation to space without a doubt NASA’s Artemis program is the most exciting. It is true that the commissioning of James Webb was a milestone and that it has already begun to take place on the replacement for the veteran International Space Station, which is also something of a sensation. However, the prospect of a short-term return to the Moon and humans reaching the surface of Mars within the next decade are overwhelming.

When Project Artemis (now the program) was launched, during the Trump administration, NASA opened a competition for the participation of private companies in it, and although in the first instance it seemed that they were going to hire two companies, a number of circumstances forced the US space agency to keep only one, and the chosen one became Space X. Blue Origin did not like this decision. all that he took the two supplier scenario for granted because he was one of the chosen. From that moment on, the company began a tortuous legal journey, while Jezz Bezos entered the fray with Elon Musk. A few months later, the legal process ended and Blue Origin was left out of the program.

However, this legal process has ended did not mean that the company’s aspirations were overbecause since then there are still moves to allow NASA to have a second contractor, which is a very important measure to guarantee the correct development of the mission in case there is any type of problem that prevents one of them from fulfilling the contract provisions.

So today these movements have borne fruit and subsequently NASA has announced that Blue Origin will be its second lunar lander supplier and that its lander will be used on the Artemis V mission., which will be the third of the program in which a human being will set foot on the moon again. Recall that Artemis I took place at the end of last year and that Artemis II is scheduled for November 2024. There is still no date set for Artemis III, which will be the return of a human being to the moon, but it is expected that it may happen sometime in 2025 .

With the Blue Origin contract, Jeff Bezos’ company’s lunar lander will join SpaceX’s module that will be used in Artemis III and Artemis IV, meaning that the US space agency will already have redundancy from that point on. at this point something that will undoubtedly be a great improvement to the program. Although after an unfortunate descent into the mud starring Bezos and Musk, Hopefully, this will not affect the cooperation between the two companies.