The Billionaire Space Race Is Really Heating Up

As the U.S. races China to the Moon, two billionaires are locked in a space race of their own. NASA has offered both Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin a chance to return astronauts to the lunar surface, and the competition just got interesting.

A bombshell report by Ars Technica’s Eric Berger has revealed exactly how Blue Origin plans to beat SpaceX to a crewed Moon landing. Internal documents obtained by Ars reportedly detail the accelerated mission architecture Blue Origin will use to attempt to land astronauts on the Moon without the highly complex orbital refueling SpaceX’s approach requires.

Gizmodo could not independently verify the contents of the documents Ars reviewed, and Blue Origin did not respond to a request for comment.

The rivalry ramps up

Before we dive into Blue Origin’s new lunar strategy, a bit of context. On Sunday, Musk sent shockwaves through the spaceflight community by announcing that SpaceX—a company built on its founder’s dream of colonizing Mars—has pivoted toward building a Moon city instead.

The move marks a seismic shift in the company’s strategic vision. After all, it was only a year ago that Musk called the Moon a “distraction,†insisting that SpaceX is “going straight to Mars.†Still, it’s not altogether surprising, as Musk’s company is currently at risk of losing its Artemis 3 lunar lander contract to Blue Origin.

The morning after Musk announced SpaceX’s Moon pivot, Bezos posted an ominous photo of a turtle peering out from the shadows (this is relevant—promise). As Berger insightfully points out, the image—unccompanied by text—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.

It appears that 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 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 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†(specialized upper stages designed to move a vehicle from one orbit to another) 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.

Sounds easy enough, right? Not quite. 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.