Jeff Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin, has teamed up with aerospace giants Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman to compete for NASA’s project to return humans to the moon by 2024, the rocket company announced Tuesday.
The partnership, which also includes Draper Labs, a not-for-profit engineering center, is being heralded by the company as evidence that newer arrivals in the space industry and established players — often seen as fierce competitors — will have to join forces to achieve NASA’s ambitious timeline, which the Trump administration recently accelerated by four years.
“We recognize that this project and the timeframe the nation is calling for is ambitious … so we’ve pulled together the best in industry to make this happen,” Brent Sherwood, the vice president of advanced development programs at Blue Origin, told reporters in announcing the partnership.
The teaming arrangement is the first to be announced since NASA released the request for proposals on Sept. 30.
Blue Origin will serve as the prime contractor on the powerhouse team and also build the lunar lander — which it unveiled earlier this year — to bring astronauts to the surface.
Lockheed Martin will develop a reusable vehicle designed to deliver the lander to and from the moon’s surface, relying on some of the technology developed for the Orion deep-space exploration capsule, according to Lisa Callahan, Lockheed’s vice president of commercial civil space.
Northrop Grumman, meanwhile, will work on the propulsion system to bring the landing platform into the moon’s orbit to begin its descent.
And Draper Labs, which worked on the Apollo moon missions between 1969 and 1972, will collaborate on navigation and other flight systems.
The partnership is a rare instance of a relatively new entrant to the space race — Blue Origin was founded in 2000 — partnering with more established companies who have worked for the Pentagon and NASA for decades.
Indeed, Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing, remain locked in a fierce competition for Air Force contracts to launch military and spy satellites.
Proposals for the lunar project, known as Artemis, are due to NASA on Nov. 1. Work is expected to begin in January.
The biggest question mark in Sherwood’s view is Congress, which has yet to decide whether to fully fund the program. “The obstacles are not really technical,” he said. “It depends on the speed of the procurement and the budget behind it.”
Some of the most influential lawmakers don’t seem inclined to support the timeline.
For instance, Rep. José Serrano (D-N.Y.), who chairs the House subcommittee that funds NASA, said moving up the moon landing by four years is merely motivated by politics.
Getting Americans back to the moon more quickly has been a top talking point for President Donald Trump.
“The eyes of the world are upon us. We cannot afford to fail,” Serrano said at a hearing last week. “Therefore I believe it is better to use your original NASA schedule of 2028 in order to have a successful, safe and cost effective mission for the benefit of the American people and the world.”
Nonetheless, Sherwood said the Blue Origin team is prepared to swiftly get to work on a goal that virtually all observers agree is a primary step in developing the economic potential of space and advancing human exploration into deep space.
“All paths to developing space go through the moon. That’s why we’re focused on it,” Sherwood said, adding that Blue Origin began working on its Blue Moon lunar lander before Trump announced his lunar ambitions. “There’s an inevitability to need to be operating on the lunar surface that I think is clear.”
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine
Source: https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/22/jeff-bezos-nasa-moon-mission-054240
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The Article Was Written/Published By: jklimas@politico.com (Jacqueline Feldscher)
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