WASHINGTON — In April, NASA awarded a $2.9 billion contract to Elon Musk to build the new moon mission's human landing system, rejecting a much more expensive bid from Jeff Bezos' company, Blue Origin.
However, Bezos is now making an extraordinary offer to try to win the contract after already losing it.
Here are the details: BBC reports that Jeff Bezos is offering NASA a discount of more than $2 billion for the agency to give his space company a lucrative human lunar landing system contract that his rival Elon Musk's SpaceX won in April this year.
In Bezos' original proposal for the lunar landing system, his Blue Origin company would team up with other companies to build three vehicles, called elements.
These three elements would be launched separately and link up in Earth orbit.
This is where the Transfer Element would be used to transport the whole package to the moon.
Once in position over the moon, the other two elements would detach, using the Descent Element's thrusters to slow them down so they could fall to the moon's surface.
The Descent Element would also protect the astronaut-carrying Ascent Element from flying rocks, although this would mean that the astronauts would have to climb down a long ladder to get to the surface.
Once it's time to return, the Ascent Element would fire its own rockets to blast back into moon orbit, where it would meet up again with the Transfer Element.
The Transfer Element would then take the astronauts and their Ascent Element back to Earth.
Once in Earth orbit, the astronauts would ditch the Transfer Element and try not to burn up during the dangerous re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
After re-entry, the Ascent Element would deploy large parachutes to land on Earth's surface.
In other words, the three elements of Bezos' system would work very much the same as NASA's first mission to the moon did back in 1969.
