Bezos’s Blue Origin Could Leapfrog SpaceX as NASA’s Lunar Lander Pick for Artemis 3

With SpaceX’s lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis 3 mission facing significant delays, the agency is looking to competitors who could provide a lander sooner. Blue Origin is a leading contender, but can Jeff Bezos’s company really beat Elon Musk back to the Moon?

Recent developments suggest it could. Jacqueline Cortese, Blue Origin’s Senior Director of Civil Space, represented the company on a Tuesday panel at the American Astronautical Society’s 2025 von Braun Space Exploration Symposium. During the event, she discussed Blue Origin’s progress on its Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) and Blue Moon Mark 2 (MK2) landers, SpaceflightNow reports.

According to Cortese, Blue Origin could launch an MK1 demonstration mission before the end of the year. MK1 is a cargo lander designed to eventually ferry up to 3 tons of payload to the lunar surface. It’s a stepping stone to the MK2 crew lander, which could (theoretically) replace SpaceX’s Starship Human Landing System (HLS) as the Artemis 3 lander—if it’s ready first.

“Especially with MK1 and some of our preceding work we’re doing, we have what we think are some good ideas about maybe a more incremental approach that could be taken advantage of for an acceleration-type scenario,” Cortese said, as SpaceflightNow reports.

SpaceX delays open the door for Blue Origin

SpaceX signed a $2.9 billion contract with NASA in 2021 to provide the first crewed lunar lander for the agency’s Artemis program. Starship HLS—a modified version of the megarocket’s upper stage—is slated to land the Artemis 3 astronauts on the Moon sometime in mid-2027.

After a rough start to Starship’s 2025 launch schedule, however, unmet technical milestones have piled up. Now, experts worry that Starship HLS could be years late for a 2027 Artemis 3 Moon landing.

Starship’s challenges largely stem from the fact that it’s the largest, most complex launch vehicle ever built. This presents significant logistical challenges to landing on the Moon—it will literally require an elevator to bring astronauts down to the lunar surface. And as it’s still in the early stages of development, its lunar landing capabilities remain unproven.

During two on-air media appearances last week, acting NASA administrator Sean Duffy said he would reopen the Artemis 3 contract to competing spaceflight companies to ensure the U.S. returns to the Moon before the end of President Trump’s term. The announcement seemed to ruffle Musk’s feathers, prompting the SpaceX CEO to hurl insults at Duffy via X.

“I’m going to let other space companies compete with SpaceX, like Blue Origin, and again, whatever one can get us there first, to the Moon, we’re going to take,” Duffy said on CNBC.

How Blue Origin could get there faster

The Blue Moon landers offer a level of simplicity Starship HLS just can’t provide. Not only are they based on a largely proven concept, they’re also much smaller, with a lower center of gravity and an easier dismount. What’s more, they’re being built by a massive team of highly equipped engineers across Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Draper, Astrobotic, and Honeybee Robotics.

NASA has already contracted Blue Origin’s MK2 for the Artemis 5 mission, which won’t launch for another several years. But the company is also developing plans for MK2 that could expedite Artemis 3.

During Tuesday’s panel, Cortese reportedly said that an MK1 lander is undergoing final stacking at a dedicated production facility in Port Canaveral in Florida. Once stacking is complete, the spacecraft will be transported to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, for a series of tests that simulate the vacuum and extreme temperature fluctuations of space.

MK1’s inaugural demonstration mission—dubbed “Pathfinder”—will attempt to land at the Moon’s south pole. This will allow Blue Origin to test critical systems and validate hardware for the MK2 lander. The mission will also carry two NASA payloads: SCALPSS (Stereo Cameras for Lunar-Plume Surface Studies) and LRA (Laser Retroreflective Array).

Cortese said the test flight “would launch in the next couple of weeks,” though she did not offer specifics about the timeline. If Blue Origin manages to get this mission off the ground before 2026, it could accelerate the development of MK2 ahead of its Artemis 5 schedule, as the two landers share much of the same hardware.

That said, Blue Origin will still face major hurdles to launching a crewed MK2 mission, namely demonstrating a propellant transfer, validating the spacecraft’s life-support system, and acquiring crew certification. And even if NASA did select it for Artemis 3, integrating this alternative landing system into the current Artemis 3 architecture could present unforeseen challenges.

For now, the pressure remains on SpaceX to deliver a viable human landing system before mid-2027. Whether Blue Origin’s progress lights a fire under Musk’s company remains to be seen.