“Today, I’m very excited, and we’re very excited to announce that we’ve attributed to SpaceX the development of our student system,” NASA Program Leader Lisa Watson Morgan said at a press conference.
This contract is SpaceX’s most important victory and solidifies the company’s position as a distinguished partner for NASA.
Last year, Elon Musk’s company became the first to successfully send a team on board the International Space Station.
SpaceX submitted a Starship rocket to the competition, which is designed to transport crews and cargo important for travel in distant space, which can land on its feet.
Prototypes of the missiles are currently being tested in Texas, but the four flying attempts have ended in an explosion.
The last manned mission to the moon, Apollo 17, occurred in December 1972, three years after humans reached its surface, with the Apollo 11 mission.
In all, there were 12 American astronauts on the lunar surface, two of them civilians: engineer Neil Armstrong and geologist Harrison Schmidt, respectively, who were the first to step on the lunar Earth and the last to this day. About 400 kilograms of lunar rocks were sent to Earth over the course of the six studies.
In May 2019, NASA announced that a new human moon mission, still free, would be called Artemis, who was, in Greco-Roman mythology, Apollo’s twin sister and goddess of hunting and moon.
Two months ago, President Donald Trump’s administration predicted four years ago, by 2024, that American astronauts would return to the moon, including the first woman.
The future crew will study in Antarctica, where there is ice in their craters and, accordingly, conditions likely to contain liquid water.
The gateway will be an orbital station on the moon, the gateway, which will also serve as a platform for Mars, to be built in partnership between NASA and its European, Russian, Canadian and Japanese counterparts and private companies, and some batteries indicate space tourism and the colonization of Mars.
