Bezos beats Musk to Mars milestone: NASA chooses Blue Origin's rocket to launch a mission to the Red Planet in 2024

daily mail ^

[algore]

Elon Musk once branded Jeff Bezos a 'dilettante' of space exploration, but the Blue Origin founder is poised to beat SpaceX to Mars.

NASA announced Wednesday that it will send two scientific spacecraft to the Red Planet aboard the first Blue Origin New Glenn rocket in August 2024 - a contract that costs $20 million.

Musk's SpaceX company was initially set to carry the NASA payload on a Falcon Heavy rocket in October of this year, alongside NASA's Psyche mission, which was bound for an asteroid.

However, the space agency pulled the additional crafts from the launch because the Falcon Heavy would not put them on the proper trajectory to insert them into Mars' orbit.

The new timeline announcement comes shortly after Musk's Starship rocket - the ship he wants to use to ferry crews to the moon and eventually Mars - blew up in a second launch attempt.

An identical pair of spacecraft making up NASA's Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorer (ESCAPADE) mission will hitch a ride on the unproven Blue Origin New Glenn rocket, each carrying three experiments to investigate the effects of solar winds on the planet's magnetosphere.

This launch is part of a broader NASA effort to use private contractors to get to Mars more cheaply.

The US space agency has made a habit of swinging by our planetary neighbor to drop off orbiters, landers, and rovers, most recently in 2020 with the Perseverance rover and Ingenuity helicopter.

NASA's decision is the latest chapter in the billionaire space race between Musk and Bezos, which earlier this year saw each company win separate multibillion-dollar contracts with NASA to go to the moon.

[Reeses]

Competitor Bezos just happens to own the biggest “news” organization in the government’s capital city.

Bezos is a union busting businessman that plays the uniparty bribe game. He saved the CIA's mouthpiece Washington Post from bankruptcy as a back scratch to the intelligence community, who then outsourced $600 million of their computer data centers to him. The tone of this article is full-on Musk hate, but Bezos is not on team Demonrat like the left assumes. His subservience to Fedzilla is all business.