Building a new Lunar Module: Musk was awarded a billion-dollar contract from NASA

Saturday 17 April 2021

Building a new lunar craft
Musk receives a multi-billion dollar contract from NASA

With his space company, Tesla founder Elon Musk landed a $ 2.9 billion order. SpaceX is building a probe for manned lunar missions. In NASA’s tender, Musk wins against a well-known competitor.

NASA has awarded a $ 2.9 billion contract to Elon Musk SpaceX to build a lunar spacecraft. This spacecraft is expected to take astronauts to the moon from 2024. NASA Administrator Lisa Watson Morgan announced that SpaceX has won a similar tender to develop a new lander for manned missions to the moon. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon’s Blue Origin space company and arms company Dynetics, also applied for the contract.

“NASA Rules !!” Tesla founder Musk wrote on Twitter after the announcement. SpaceX also responded on Twitter: “It is an honor to help NASAArtemis to enter a new era in human space exploration.” The US Federal Space Agency wants to return astronauts to the moon for the first time since 1972. Its goal is to be able to conduct regular missions to the moon.

According to NASA, SpaceX’s spaceship has a spacious cabin and two airlocks for astronauts to walk on the moon. The design provides a fully reusable takeoff and landing system suitable for trips to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations in space.

The Artemis 1 mission is scheduled to begin as a test flight to the moon at the end of this year. Initially without a crew, it must orbit the moon and then return to Earth. With Artemis 2, astronauts are expected to orbit the moon in 2023. Only Artemis 3 will actually land on Earth’s satellite with astronauts in 2024.

SpaceX has offered a further development of the Starship spaceship in a NASA tender, which Musk also wants to make trips to Mars possible in the long term. Recently, however, some prototypes exploded during testing. SpaceX has already proven itself in space travel with its Falcon-9 rocket. In November, it completed its first manned mission to the International Space Station.