[서울신문] Bezos beaten musk… SpaceX selected as NASA’s lunar ship operator

SpaceX, an American space exploration company founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, has been selected as a lunar lander operator, overtaking Blue Origin, led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos.

According to the Associated Press, the NASA announced on the 16th (local time) that it has selected SpaceX as the developer of the lunar probe for the’Artemis Project’. NASA, which is pursuing the Artemis project to send humanity back to the moon with the goal of 2024, has awarded SpaceX $2.89 billion (approximately 3.2 trillion won) among three candidates, including SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dinetics It was chosen as the company’s lunar lander. The Artemis project is a lunar landing project that is being re-implemented half a century after the last lunar landing of the Apollo 17 in 1972.

NASA plans to take four astronauts into the lunar orbit on an Orion spacecraft under development with Lockheed Martin, and then transfer a pair of male and female astronauts to SpaceX’s’Starship’ lunar lander and send them down to the lunar surface. to be. The two astronauts set foot on the moon will explore the lunar surface for a week, then board the lander and return to the Orion spacecraft floating in the moon’s orbit.

NASA cited as an advantage that SpaceX is developing a reusable launch and landing integrated spacecraft. This method is cheaper than Blue Origin’s lunar lander, which consists of three separate modules: ascent, descent, and transfer. The fact that SpaceX dreams of human migration to the Moon and Mars through a recycled spacecraft was also beneficial in the selection of a business operator. Reuters said, “The world’s richest men, Bezos and Musk, competed for humanity’s return to the moon, and SpaceX won.” He said, “I gave him a hand.”

Senior Reporter Kyu-Hwan Kim [email protected]