NASA Wants SpaceX and Blue Origin To Deliver Cargo To the Moon

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: After asking both SpaceX and Blue Origin to develop cargo landers for its Artemis missions, NASA has announced plans to use those landers to deliver heavy equipment to the Moon. The agency wants Elon Musk's SpaceX to use its Starship cargo lander to deliver a pressurized rover to the Moon "no earlier" than 2032, while Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin will be tasked with delivering a lunar surface habitat no sooner than 2033. Both launches will support NASA's Artemis missions, which aim to bring humans back to the Moon for the first time in over 50 years.

Both companies are developing human landing systems for Artemis missions -- SpaceX for Artemis III and Blue Origin for Artemis V. NASA later asked both companies to develop cargo-hauling variants of those landers, capable of carrying 26,000 to 33,000 pounds of equipment and other materials to the Moon. NASA says it will issue proposals to SpaceX and Blue Origin at the beginning of next year.

Weight

[flyingfsck]

So 30,000 +-10% pounds. Is that the weight on Earth or on the Moon? There may be lots of room for a contractual dispute there. The 30,000 pound payload would probably need a million pounds of propellant to get there.

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[joh]

It isn't weight at all, it's mass.

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[quenda]

So 30,000 +-10% pounds.

NASA actually specified 12-15 tons ( 1 ton = 1000 kg ). But The Verge dumbed it down :)

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[Pseudonymous Powers]

When it's a metric ton, they generally spell it "tonnes".

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[jfdavis668]

Bezos told them they could get free delivery if they signed up for Blue Origin Prime.

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[douglasfir77]

I doubt congress will spring for $139,000,000 per year for Blue Origin Prime.

It would be impressive if...

[rossdee]

Bezos could offer same day delivery, like you can get with Amazon...

Re: It would be impressive if...

[flyingfsck]

In ye olden days, one would simply get a cow to jump over the moon.

Re:

[necro81]

Bezos could offer same day delivery, like you can get with Amazon...

That's nuthin', Planet Express will get you there [youtube.com] before you can even finish counting down.

If there was a reason to go back to the moon..

[zawarski]

.. we would have gone back to the moon.

By that time SpaceX will have a base on Mars

[cjonslashdot]

NASA still does things in 1960s time. It's time that they caught up to the capabilities that exist today - that we can now put large things in orbit for 1000 times less money than before.

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[gtall]

Not really, it makes sense to take our time thinking through what should be sent up before Elmo starts really polluting the atmosphere to get it there. Elmo does not give a flying rat's ass about the environment, look at what he'd doing to Texas....although it isn't clear Texans give a flying rat's ass about the environment either.

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[cjonslashdot]

Hi. SpaceX's new rocket uses methane, which burns to create CO2 and H2O. CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but this reaction is much cleaner than what a lot of other rockets use. The cleanest would be hydrogen, but hydrogen is very difficult to store.

There are something like a million commercial airliners that fly every day (data is here: https://www.oag.com/airline-fr... [oag.com]), so the amount of greenhouse gas from rocket launches it extremely tiny by comparison - like literally five orders of magnitude less.

In terms of

Elon wants to eliminate NASA

[drinkypoo]

Dollars to doughnuts that Elno will do his best to eliminate NASA and replace it with SpaceX, granting himself all of their facilities.