Musk’s £2bn for Starship enterprise
NASA has chosen Elon Musk’s firm SpaceX to build a lander to take humans back to the Moon.
The craft, based on the company’s Starship, will carry the next man and the first woman down to the lunar surface some time in the next decade as part of the space agency’s Artemis programme.
SpaceX was up against a joint bid from traditional aerospace giants, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as well as Alabama-based Dynetics for the contract worth £2.15bn.
Kathy Lueders, Nasa’s head of human exploration, said the agency was taking “a step forward for women’s equality” as well as “long-term deep space exploration”.
She added: “This critical step puts humanity on a path to sustainable lunar exploration and keeps our eyes on missions farther into the Solar System, including Mars.”
Entrepreneur Musk has been developing the Starship for years. It is a crucial component of his longterm plans for settling humans on Mars.
With a spacious cabin and two airlocks, allowing astronauts to exit for moonwalks, it’s a far cry from the cramped lunar module that carried 12 men to the Moon during the USA’s Apollo missions from 1969 to 1972.