NASA asks US companies for proposals for second lunar lander

NASA has asked American companies to develop a second commercial lunar lander. This lunar lander will be developed alongside SpaceX’s Starship and will not be deployed before 2026. Blue Origin, among others, had plans for such a lunar lander.

The American space agency NASA speaks about ‘additional opportunities’ for companies to develop lunar landers. These are lunar landers that can take astronauts from a space station in orbit around the moon to the surface of the moon and vice versa. This is done through the Lunar Gateway program, part of NASA’s Artemis moon program. That program has been in existence since 2017 and, in addition to the Lunar Gateway, also includes a lander to be built by the industry.

The first two landing missions will be carried out by SpaceX and its Starship. Elon Musk’s company won a $2.89 billion contract for this last April. However, this will not happen before April 2025 and after that a second ‘demonstration mission’ has to take place.

The US government has now given NASA the budget to develop a second lunar lander. The space agency had wanted this for some time, but concrete plans were set aside due to lack of money, leaving only SpaceX as a partner. According to NASA, two lunar landers means that there is more competition and that the organization is not dependent on one party for the Artemis missions. The two companies must demonstrate that the lunar landers can successfully bring humans to the surface of the moon before NASA orders them for subsequent missions.

Blue Origin, which previously entered the race to develop a lunar lander, disagreed with the decision to give only one party the lander contract. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ company sued NASA in August, but the judge ruled that NASA had done nothing wrong. This lawsuit, in part, resulted in the SpaceX moon mission being postponed for a year, until 2025.

Blue Origin’s previous lunar lander design for the Artemis missions