The Billionaire Space Race: A New Chapter
The race to the Moon is heating up, and it's not just NASA's Artemis program that's in the spotlight. Two tech billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are locked in their own space race, each vying to be the first to land humans on the Moon.
But here's where it gets controversial... NASA has offered both SpaceX and Blue Origin a chance to return astronauts to the lunar surface. And while Musk's SpaceX has been working towards colonizing Mars, Bezos's Blue Origin has a different plan. According to a bombshell report by Ars Technica's Eric Berger, Blue Origin plans to beat SpaceX to a crewed Moon landing using a new, accelerated mission architecture.
The rivalry is intensifying
Before we dive into Blue Origin's new lunar strategy, let's set the stage. On Sunday, Musk sent shockwaves through the spaceflight community by announcing that SpaceX has pivoted from its Mars colonization dream to building a Moon city. This move marks a seismic shift in the company's strategic vision, as Musk had previously called the Moon a "distraction" and insisted that SpaceX is "going straight to Mars".
The morning after Musk's announcement, Bezos posted an ominous photo of a turtle peering out from the shadows. As Berger insightfully points out, the image is almost certainly a nod to Blue Origin's mascot: a tortoise. Bezos has previously explained that the tortoise is a reference to "The Tortoise and the Hare," one of Aesop's Fables. In his eyes, Blue is the tortoise that will beat SpaceX—the hare—to a crewed lunar landing through slow and steady development.
NASA's Artemis 3 mission
NASA's Artemis 3 mission will be the first to return humans to the Moon since the Apollo era. In 2021, the agency contracted SpaceX to build a crew lander for the mission, called the Starship Human Landing System (HLS). NASA originally hoped the lander would be ready in time to launch Artemis 3 by 2024, but significant developmental delays pushed the mission back to 2028 and prompted the agency to reopen the contract in October.
Since then, Blue Origin has emerged as SpaceX's competitor for the Artemis 3 lander contract. Bezos's company is actively prepping its Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) cargo lander for its first test flight, slated to launch this year. Its success would pave the way for the MK2 crew lander, and if that vehicle is ready to fly before the Starship HLS, Musk can kiss his Artemis 3 contract goodbye.
Blue Origin's new plan
Here's how Blue Origin plans to pull this off. The documents reviewed by Ars reportedly detail two missions: an uncrewed demo mission and a crewed demo landing.
Berger reports that the uncrewed flight will require three launches of Blue's New Glenn rocket. The first two will put two "transfer stages" into low-Earth orbit, and the third will put a smaller version of the MK2 lander, called "Blue Moon MK2-IL," into orbit. These three vehicles will dock to each other and the first transfer stage will boost them into an elliptical orbit around Earth.
The first stage will then separate and fall back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere. That's when the second transfer stage will take over, boosting the MK2-IL lander into an elliptical orbit around the Moon. The lander will then separate, descend to the lunar surface, and ascend back into low-lunar orbit.
The crewed landing will require four New Glenn launches, three to put three transfer stages into LEO and a fourth to launch MK2-IL and a docking port. All four vehicles will dock to the port. The first transfer stage will boost the stack into an elliptical Earth orbit, and the second will push it to rendezvous with NASA's Orion spacecraft—carrying a crew of astronauts—in a specialized, highly stable orbit around the Moon.
Orion will dock with MK2-IL to allow the crew to board. The third transfer stage will then move MK2-IL into a low-lunar orbit and separate, allowing the lander to descend to the lunar surface and then ascend to re-rendezvous with Orion.
While this approach will not require orbital refueling, Blue Origin still must prove it can pull off complex dockings and deep-space maneuvers it has never attempted before, as Berger notes. So while Blue Origin is aiming for an uncrewed Moon landing later this year—potentially ahead of SpaceX's 2027 target—both companies remain far from the finish line.
