Artemis Mission

After evaluating three commercial designs for new Artemis moon landers, NASA on Friday awarded a single $2.9 billion contract to SpaceX, rejecting more expensive proposals from a team led by Blue Origin, owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and another led by Dynetics.

The contract will cover one unpiloted test flight from lunar orbit down to the surface and back again, and one piloted flight carrying two astronauts launched to the moon in a Lockheed Martin Orion capsule atop NASA's Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket.

Humans might soon visit the Moon again. NASA has completed a test on the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, igniting the four main engines for eight minutes and nineteen seconds on Thursday whereas the first test in January only ran for a minute.

"The SLS is the most powerful rocket NASA has ever built, and during today's test the core stage of the rocket generated more than 1.6 million pounds of thrust within seven seconds. The SLS is an incredible feat of engineering and the only rocket capable of powering America's next-generation missions that will place the first woman and the next man on the Moon," said acting NASA Administrator Steve Jurczyk in a statement.

We're going back to the Moon! 18 astronauts, nine of them women, are training for NASA's upcoming Artemis missions to travel to the Moon and, eventually, to Mars. The group includes the first woman who will walk on the lunar surface in 2024.