Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin Gets $35M Award From NASA To Electrify Moon Using Lunar Dust

Billionaire Jeff Bezos‘ aerospace company Blue Origin was one among the 11 companies chosen by NASA on Tuesday to develop technologies that could support long-term exploration of the Moon and space.

What Happened: The 11 companies and their respective projects were chosen under NASA’s sixth tipping point opportunity. The space agency identifies a particular technology as a tipping point if an investment will significantly mature the technology for future application.

As part of the selection, Blue Origin was awarded $34.7 million to advance its Blue Alchemist technology — a proposed commercial solution that produces solar cells from the dust and crushed rock on the surface of the moon.

“The breakthrough (technology) would bootstrap unlimited electricity and power transmission cable anywhere on the surface of the Moon,” the company said in a statement.

Why It Matters: Other companies whose projects were chosen to be funded by NASA include Astrobotic Technology, Big Metal Additive, Freedom Photonics, Lockheed Martin, Redwire, Protoinnovations, Psionic, United Launch Alliance, Varda Space Industries, and Zeno Power Systems.

NASA expects these technologies to enable a sustained human presence on the Moon through Artemis and other missions by providing the different infrastructure required. Five of the chosen projects cater to purely enabling Moon exploration while the remaining six cater to other areas of space exploration

The agency’s total estimated contribution to these partnerships is $150 million.

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