Blue Origin on the Moon in 2020

After almost fifty years from the Apollo 11’s lunar landing (July 20, 1969), a lot of investments to get back on the Moon from major private companies, engaged in a “new race to space”, where the NASA is involved as well.
Few days after the announcement of SpaceX (the company of Elom Musk, the owner of Tesla, PayPal, Hyperloop…) that is ready to bring two tourists-astronauts around the Moon in 2018, here comes even Blue Origin, the company of Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Washington Post …), that is almost ready to launch a cargo service to the Moon with the purpose to bringing up tools, technologies and materials to build a permanent base, a project already considered in the past by NASA. “For America it is time to return to the Moon to stay, this time,” says Bezos: ‘design and build a permanent lunar settlement is a goal worthy of this country” and certainly favored by the new administration. The previous president, Barack Obama, had in fact put aside plans for a return to the Moon and asked NASA to aim instead to Mars: an address that had raised many doubts, because Mars is “very far in the future”.
Donald Trump, instead does not hide his desire to see the US back on the Moon – hence the acceleration requested to Space Agency, which is now redesigning the Exploration Mission 1, that initially was defined without crew.


READY TO THE MOON. Blue Origin would provide his launcher, New Shepard (that has already flown five times reaching 100 kilometers altitude and returning to the ground ready to be reused) and a cargo spacecraft, the Blue Moon, with destination the crater Shackleton, one of the most favorable areas for the settlement.

The Blue Moon could bring up to 4,500-5,000 kg of materials, from July 2020, but only with the technological and financial cooperation of NASA: “we have a system able to recover the launcher and bring a capsule exactly at the desired destination, but investments must be contiguous” said Bezos. Meanwhile several other companies are ready to provide infrastructure, like Bigelow with its inflatable habitation modules or additional services, the United Launch Alliance (Boeing and Lockheed Martin), that are committed to designing a transport network around the Moon.


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