La Jornada: Contracts awarded to four US companies

Cape Canaveral. NASA is already ordering landers, rovers and drones for a lunar base, less than two months after the Artemis II mission’s lunar flyby.

The agency presented the first phase of its plans for the lunar base, awarding contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars to four American companies.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin will provide two landers to transport vehicles to the lunar surface, at a point near the Moon’s South Pole. These will be built by Astrolab and Lunar Outpost. Firefly Aerospace, which successfully landed on the Moon last year, will deliver the first drones. Ideally, all of this equipment is supposed to arrive before the first Artemis astronauts land on the Moon, which is planned for 2028.

For next year’s Artemis III mission, another team of astronauts will practice docking NASA’s Orion capsule in orbit around Earth with the lunar modules being developed by Blue Origin and SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, for manned missions.

NASA plans to launch Artemis III in mid-2027, with a two-astronaut landing in 2028. The second phase of the lunar base, from 2029 to the early 2030s, will begin building permanent infrastructure, including an electrical grid. As for when the base will be ready to house astronauts for extended periods in specialized permanent habitats, this is expected to occur sometime in the 2030s, during the third phase.