NASA Chooses Three Landers to Return Americans to the Moon

It’s been nearly half a century since the U.S. had a spacecraft capable of landing human beings on the moon. As of today, it has not one, but three—if everything goes right. NASA officials announced on April 30, in a teleconference with space-industry leaders, the three finalists it has chosen to build the 21st century version of the Apollo-era’s well loved lunar excursion module (LEM), the four-legged, gold-foil, so-ugly-it-was-beautiful machine that landed six crews on the surface of the moon from 1969 to 1972. Unlike the LEM, which was effectively designed by NASA and then built to order by the Grumman corporation, the new landers are being designed entirely by private companies, which will then compete to prove to NASA that theirs is the ship the agency should pick. The company names were announced alphabetically at the teleconference, but the first one called out—Blue Origin, of Kent, Washington, founded and owned by Amazon boss Jeff Bezos—might be the best bet for success anyway. Blue Origin is working with three other companies (Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Draper) to design a two-stage lander similar to the LEM. The LEM landed on the moon in a single piece and the astronauts then blasted back off in just the vehicle’s upper portion, using the bottom half as a sort of launch platform. The second company, Dynetics, of Huntsville, Alabama, is proposing to simplify things, building a one-stage vehicle that will land in a singl...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Source Type: news