New York: Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos offered to cover up to $2 billion of NASA costs in exchange for a contract to build a lunar lander to land astronauts on the moon.
Nasa in April awarded SpaceX, owned by rival billionaire Elon Musk, a $2.9bn contract to build a spacecraft to bring astronauts to the lunar surface as early as 2024, rejecting bids from Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics. Blue Origin had partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper in the bid.
Bezos, the founder and executive chair of Amazon, launched into space earlier this month with a ride on the first crewed New Shepard rocket flight, a project of his Blue Origin company.
He and his fellow passengers floated in microgravity for a couple of minutes before their capsule returned and landed after 10 minutes and 10 seconds.
