Twelve astronauts have walked on the Moon in history, with the last landing in 1972. Back then, the main rivals in the lunar race were the USA and the USSR. Today, two of the planet’s richest men — SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk and Amazon and Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos — are competing to explore the Earth's satellite. Both billionaires plan to land astronauts on the Moon before the end of this decade
💪 Lunar race key moments
2017: NASA launches the Artemis lunar program.
2018: Musk plans to send the first space tourist on a flight around the moon in 2023. The plan didn't go through.
2019: Bezos unveils the Blue Moon lunar landing module prototype and bids for a contract with NASA.
2021: Musk wins the competition. NASA awards SpaceX a $2.9bn contract to develop a lunar module. Bezos sues NASA, accusing the agency of monopoly. Musk's contract is temporarily suspended.
2023: Blue Origin signs a $3.4bn contract with NASA to send astronauts to the Moon in 2029-2030.
2024: The Odysseus robotic lander touches down in the Moon's south polar region. The first private spacecraft to reach the Moon is owned by Kam Ghaffarian, billionaire and co-founder of Intuitive Machines. The launch vehicle was Falcon 9 by SpaceX.
🛸 How are Musk’s and Bezos' strategies different?
Elon Musk has always run his aerospace operation like a for-profit enterprise, while Jeff Bezos has, until recently, treated Blue Origin as a research project.
SpaceX is committed to a mission to Mars, so the Starship uses methane, a molecule that can be synthesized on Mars, as a fuel source. Blue Origin's lunar rover runs on hydrogen, which could theoretically be mined from Moon water someday.
If you want to get the public fired up, you’ve got to put a base on the Moon.
— Elon Musk
🏆 Who will be the first?
While SpaceX already boasts about 350 successful launches, Jeff Bezos could still overtake Elon Musk. SpaceX's main problem is a complicated and expensive refueling system, especially because of Starship's large size.
Blue Origin's Mark 1 spacecraft is smaller and lighter. Bezos calls his refueling station a “space tug.” After refueling the lander in the Earth orbit, the tug will follow it into the Moon’s orbit and then return to the Earth orbit for a new batch of fuel.
⌛️ Deadlines
SpaceX:
2025 — unmanned lunar landing
2026 — landing astronauts on the Moon
Blue Origin:
2025 — sending a cargo ship to the Moon
2029 — human landing on the Moon
More on the topic:
A Colony on Mars by 2050
Elon Musk on Interplanetary Missions
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