{"id":446667,"date":"2026-05-26T21:23:07","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T21:23:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/446667\/"},"modified":"2026-05-26T21:23:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T21:23:07","slug":"nasa-selects-jeff-bezoss-blue-origin-for-first-of-three-uncrewed-lunar-missions-nasa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/446667\/","title":{"rendered":"Nasa selects Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin for first of three uncrewed lunar missions | Nasa"},"content":{"rendered":"

Nasa<\/a> announced on Tuesday ambitious plans for three uncrewed lunar missions this year to kickstart construction of a $20bn moon base<\/a>, and said it had chosen the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin<\/a>, ahead of Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX<\/a>, to conduct the first.<\/p>\n

The revelation by Nasa\u2019s administrator, Jared Isaacman, at a press conference in Washington DC marked the first detailed public explanation of how and when the moon base will be built.<\/p>\n

He said the three missions planned for 2026 would be followed by \u201cmore than a dozen\u201d more in the coming years to test systems and equipment. He said the highly successful Artemis II mission<\/a> last month that sent four astronauts around the moon<\/a> for the first time since 1972 had been both a catalyst and incentive to advance the moon base plan.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople are looking up again, believing in big things again, and paying attention as America returns to the moon again, and this time to stay,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

He added, without mentioning any names, that the agency had been \u201chaving the tough conversations with those failing to meet expectations\u201d since the Artemis splashdown on 10 April.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are not jumping right into the glass dome moon base. We intend to take an iterative approach, sending a demand signal to industry for a lot of landers and rovers and tech demonstrations, and all the scientific payloads these missions can accommodate,\u201d Isaacman said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are leveraging the Nasa playbook from the 1960s, figuring out what works and what doesn\u2019t in this epic science of survival, because the moon base is as beautiful as it is hostile.\u201d<\/p>\n

The headline announcement was the selection of Bezos\u2019s Blue Origin<\/a> company to conduct the first mission, as early as fall. It has been awarded $230.4m to support each of its first two moon base missions, Nasa said, but will largely fund the operation itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cMoon Base One will be the first privately funded lunar lander mission in history,\u201d Isaacman said. It will take Endurance<\/a>, Blue Origin\u2019s cryogenically propelled cargo lander, holding multiple scientific payloads from Nasa and private partners, to the Shackleton de Gerlache Ridge<\/a> area of the moon\u2019s south pole.<\/p>\n

Isaacman said the objective was to \u201cdemonstrate critical capabilities that reduce risk for the human landing system missions\u201d, and that Bezos\u2019s company was picked \u201cbecause of the role Blue Origin<\/a> plays in the Artemis program\u201d.<\/p>\n

Blue Origin is competing with SpaceX to provide crew landers for an upcoming sequence of Artemis missions, including the planned 2028 return of humans to the moon on Artemis IV. Nasa will evaluate the SpaceX Starship Human Landing System (HLS) and Blue Origin\u2019s Blue Moon lander during next year\u2019s Artemis III test mission in lower Earth orbit and decide thereafter.<\/p>\n

Blue Origin suffered a setback<\/a> last month when a payload from the third flight of its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket ended up in the wrong orbit, but was cleared to return to flight by the Federal Aviation Administration last week.<\/p>\n

Both companies have built large new facilities in or close to Cape Canaveral\u2019s Kennedy Space<\/a> Center to support crewed and cargo missions in partnership with Nasa.<\/p>\n

As well as awarding Blue Origin the first moon base mission, Nasa announced a series of smaller contracts with private companies<\/a> involved in the agency\u2019s moon-to-Mars projects. They include Lunar Outpost, which has been working on lunar rovers, and Firefly Aerospace, which in March last year became the first private operator to make a successful moon touchdown with its Blue Ghost lander<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The agency\u2019s \u201cblueprint for an enduring lunar presence\u201d is also laid out on a new Nasa moonbase website<\/a> launched on Wednesday, which gives a timeframe between 2029 and 2032 for establishing a base with \u201coperating capability\u201d. A \u201csemi-permanent presence\u201d will follow in 2032 or beyond, it said.<\/p>\n

The moon base project forms part of Donald Trump\u2019s national space policy<\/a>, including directing Nasa to accelerate the Artemis program to achieve the next human moon landing ahead of China<\/a>, establish a permanently habitable lunar base and develop a nuclear space reactor.<\/p>\n

Partnerships with private operators, Nasa has said, can significantly reduce the cost to taxpayers, and create a thriving space economy providing thousands of new jobs while conducting inspiring missions of science and discovery.<\/p>\n

Isaacman, who has attempted to align the Trump administration\u2019s planned budget cuts to Nasa<\/a> with the president\u2019s ambitious vision, said the world had \u201cpaused to take notice\u201d during Artemis II. He said he hoped that mission, along with moon base plans and other moon-aligned projects, would inspire what he called a \u201cgolden age of exploration\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m often asked why we send our astronauts into such harsh and dangerous and unforgiving environment of space or the lunar surface, and at such great cost,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe go for the technology we will pioneer to get there, the science, and all that we will learn that will make life better here on Earth, to advance humankind on this great adventure, to inspire the next generation to do it better than we can, and, to be very clear, to master the skills for where we will inevitably go next.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Nasa announced on Tuesday ambitious plans for three uncrewed lunar missions this year to kickstart construction of a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":446668,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-446667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=446667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/446667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/446668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=446667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=446667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=446667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}