Billionaire Jeff Bezos says his Blue Origin space company will take first woman to the moon’s surface

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin will take the first woman to the moon’s surface, the billionaire said on Friday as Nasa nears a decision to pick its first privately built lunar landers capable of sending astronauts to the moon by 2024.

“This (BE-7) is the engine that will take the first woman to the surface of the Moon,” Bezos said in a post on Instagram with a video of the engine test this week at Nasa Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama.

The BE-7 engine, which Blue Origin has been developing for years, has tallied 1,245 seconds of test-fire time and will power the company’s National Team Human Landing System lunar lander.

Blue Origin leads a “national team” as the prime contractor that it assembled in 2019 to help build its Blue Moon lander. That team includes Lockheed Martin Corp, Northrop Grumman Corp and Draper.

Blue Origin has vied for lucrative government contracts in recent years and is competing with rival billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Dynetics, owned by Leidos Holdings Inc, to win a contract to build Nasa’s next human lunar landing system to ferry humans to the moon in the next decade.

In April, Nasa awarded a lunar lander development contract to Blue Origin’s team worth US$579 million, as well as two other companies: SpaceX which received US$135 million to help develop its Starship system and Leidos-owned Dynetics which won US$253 million.