NASA has awarded a £2.1billion contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX to build a lander that will return humans to the moon as early as 2024.
The agency picked the firm over billionaire rival Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and defence contractor Dynetics Inc.
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Tesla chief Musk celebrated by tweeting “Nasa Rules!!”
The lander is based on his firm’s Starship craft being tested in Texas.
Nasa said it will carry two US astronauts as part of its Artemis programme, which could lead to a permanent lunar base and a Mars landing.
“We won’t stop at the moon,” said Nasa’s acting administrator Steve Jurczyk. “Mars is the ultimate goal.”
Nasa declined to provide a target launch date for the moon-landing Artemis mission, saying a review is underway.
The Trump administration had set a 2024 deadline, but on Friday, Nasa officials called it a goal.
“We’ll do it when it’s safe,” said Kathy Lueders, who leads Nasa’s human space exploration office.
She indicated Nasa and SpaceX are shooting for later this decade.
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The astronauts will fly to the moon on the Nasa-launched Orion capsule, then transfer to Starship in lunar orbit for the ride down to the surface and back.
Nasa has said at least one of the first moonwalkers since 1972 would be the first woman on the moon.
Another goal of the program, according to the space agency, is to send a person of colour to the lunar surface.
On Friday, Jurczyk greeted the four astronauts arriving at Kennedy Space Center for SpaceX’s third crew launch in less than a year.
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By coincidence, their flight to the International Space Station is set for next Thursday Earth Day.
It’s a reminder of Nasa’s core mission of studying the home planet, Jurczyk said.
The three men and one woman represent the US France and Japan: Nasa’s Shane Kimbrough and Megan McArthur, Thomas Pesquet and Akihiko Hoshide, all experienced space fliers.
“It’s definitely getting real,” Kimbrough, the spacecraft commander, said after arriving by plane from Houston.
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This will be SpaceX’s first crew flight to use a recycled Falcon rocket and Dragon crew capsule.
Nasa turned to US private companies for crew transport after the space shuttle program ended in 2011.
Certainly, I think all of them, until we get several years under our belt, should be considered test flights, Kimbrough told reporters.
SpaceX uses the same kind of rocket and similar capsules for supply deliveries, and recycles those as well.
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McArthur is the only member of the crew who has yet to visit the space station.
She flew the shuttle to the Hubble Space Telescope in 2009. And launching out of Kennedy is new to Pesquet after more than 11 years as an astronaut.
“We’re living in the golden age of human spaceflight,” said Pesquet, a former Air France pilot. “Looks like everybody, every country, has a project or a spacecraft.”
The astronauts left the runway in a pair of white gull-winged Teslas; SpaceX founder Musk also runs the electric car company.
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They had an early bedtime to sync up with what will be pretty much an all-nighter Thursday. Liftoff time is 6:11am ET (11:11am BST).
The four will replace the SpaceX crew that launched last November.
Those four will return to Earth at the end of April.
A fresh three-person Soyuz crew, meanwhile, arrived at the space station last week from Kazakhstan, replacing two Russians and one American due back on Earth this weekend.
What is SpaceX?
Here’s what you need to know…
SpaceX is a cash-flushed rocket company that wants to take man to Mars.
It was set up by eccentric billionaire Elon Musk in 2002 and is based in Hawthorne, California.
SpaceX’s first aim was to build rockets that can autonomously land back on Earth for refurbishment and re-use.
The technology makes launching and operating space flights more efficient, and therefore cheaper.
SpaceX currently uses its reusable Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets to fly cargo to the International Space Station (ISS) for Nasa.
It also carries satellites and other space tech into orbit for various government agencies and multinational companies.
The company took astronauts to the ISS for the first time in 2020.
Other future missions involve carrying tourists to the ISS and astronauts to the Moon and Mars.
Musk has repeatedly said he believes humanity must colonise Mars to save itself from extinction.
He plans to get a SpaceX rocket to the Red Planet by 2027.
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In other news, Nasa’s Mars helicopter Ingenuity is primed to make its historic first flight this week.
An astronaut has shared a stunning video of the Milky Way galaxy captured from a SpaceX capsule.
And, the mystery surrounding what looks like giant spiders on the surface of Mars may finally have been solved.
What do you make of Nasa’s Moon plans? Let us know in the comments…
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
