![]() ![]() The award is another indication that Blue Origin is trying to position itself as a key player in helping NASA build a permanent presence on and around the moon as part of the Artemis program. “We can make power systems on the moon directly from materials that exist everywhere on the surface, without special substances brought from Earth.” “To make long-term presence on the moon viable, we need abundant electrical power,” the company wrote in the post. The oxygen could be used for humans to breathe. The testing, using a lunar regolith simulant, has created silicon pure enough to make solar cells to be used on the lunar surface, the company said. In a blog post this year, Blue Origin said it developed a reactor that reaches temperatures of nearly 3,000 degrees and uses an electrical current to separate iron, silicon and aluminum from oxygen in the regolith. The largest award, $34.7 million, went to billionaire Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin space venture, which has been working on a project since 2021 called Blue Alchemist to build solar cells and transmission wire out of the moon’s regolith - rocks and dirt. “We’re trying to start that technology development to make that a reality in the future,” he said. Materials on the moon must be used to extract the necessities such as water, fuel and metal for construction, Desai said. In an interview, Prasun Desai, NASA’s acting associate administrator for space technology, said astronauts on the moon will be like “the settlers who came to Jamestown. The contracts awarded Tuesday are some of the first steps the agency is taking toward developing the technologies that would allow humans to live for extended periods of time on the moon and in deep space. Instead of going to the moon and returning home, as was done during the Apollo era of the 1960s and early ‘70s, NASA intends to build a sustainable presence focusing on the lunar South Pole, where there is water in the form of ice. Under its Artemis program, NASA intends to fly a crew of four around the moon by the end of 2024, with a landing to come as early as 2025, though the schedules of those missions could slip. The awards come as NASA is working to return astronauts to the lunar surface for the first time since 1972. In all, the agency is investing a total of $150 million, while the 11 companies that received awards are required to invest their own money to pay at least 10 to 25 percent of their projects’ costs. ![]() NASA took a significant step Tuesday toward allowing humans on the moon to “live off the land,” awarding several contracts to build landing pads, roads and habitats on the lunar surface, use nuclear power for energy and even lay a high-voltage power line over half a mile. ![]()
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