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Search for Elon Musk podcast. Under NASA's Artemis campaign, the agency and its partners will send large pieces of equipment to the lunar surface to enable long term scientific exploration of the moon for the benefit of all humanity. Now, NASA's human landing systems provider, SpaceX and Blue Origin are beginning development of lunar Landers, the SpaceX, Starship and Blue Origin ship as well, for large cargo deliveries to support these needs.
YES has contracted SpaceX and Blue Origin to provide landing systems to take astronauts to the Moon surface from lunar orbit beginning with Artemis 3. And that's going to be someplace between 2028 and 2030 right now, but probably going to slip a little bit later than that. Now, the agency has asked the two companies to develop cargo versions of their human landing Landers as an option under their existing contracts.
The cargo variants are expected to land approximately 26,000 to 33,000 lbs, or 12 to 15 metric tons of payload on the lunar surface and be in service no earlier than the Artemis 7
mission. Now NASA spokesperson, the Human Landing Systems program manager at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL, Lisa Watson Morgan, said it's essential that NASA has the capability to land not just astronauts, but large pieces of equipment such as pressurized Rovers on the moon for maximum return on science and
exploration activities. And she said, beginning this work now allow SpaceX and Blue Origin to leverage their respective human landing designs to provide cargo variance that NASA will need in the future. Not only will they be landing. Rovers. On the moon, but they'll also be landing habitats, possibly in the future too, and these Rovers could transport habitats around the moon's surface.
Now. NASA expects the cargo versions of the company's Landers to be modified versions of their HLS human landing systems that are currently being developed for Artemis 3-4 and five, and modifications will include adjustments for payload interfaces and deployment mechanisms. And the cargo variants will not have human life support systems. They're going to be autonomous, flying to the moon with just cargo on them.
And this initial work allows the companies to proceed with development for the cargo Landers through a preliminary design review, the step that establishes the basis for
proceeding with detailed design. Now SpaceX is conducting its work under the next step, Appendix H contract, and Blue Origin is conducting its work under the next step, Appendix P. And NASA officially exercised the options out of those contracts in November of 2023 to begin work on the large COCAR Landers. Now with Artemis, NASA will explore more of the Moon than ever before, learn how to live and work away from home, and prepare for human missions to
the Red Planet of Mars. And Artemis requires the best of International Space agencies, private industries like SpaceX and Blue Origin, and academia to establish the infrastructure for a long term scientific research and exploration. And as of now, SpaceX is currently building their massive Starship program in South Texas and they're doing the 4th launch of the Starship program in the coming weeks, possibly a month from now. So stay on the lookout for that.
Blue Origin is developing their gigantic rocket as well, the New Glen, and also their Lander at the same time, and we're expecting a launch of New Glen sometime in the next fiscal year. It's going to be a wild time for rocket and spaceflight, so stay tuned for all of that. Stay tuned to this channel as well because we're going to bring you all the coverage of that. Also check out our YouTube channel at Space Newspod for any spaceflight coverage that you'll ever need.
Now let's get back to the Starship program. It seems as if the Starship Flight 4 will be a massive improvement over Flight 3. Now with Flight 3, they launched the ship, they did the return maneuver for the booster, but they had to detonate the booster over the Gulf of Mexico because something wasn't going right. We're not exactly sure. SpaceX didn't tell anybody what happened, but we know that the booster did blow up under its own accord.
Then after the booster. Met its own fate over the Gulf of Mexico. The ship continued on near the Indian Ocean and continued its mission and they did a a test of the Bay doors for Starlink satellite deployment and they also did a fuel. Test. At that point too, so it. Looks like. Flight 4 of Starship, which is coming up, like I said, in a few weeks, hopefully in a few weeks, probably a month, that'll do a similar flight path towards the Indian Ocean.
They may stray off that a little bit because the FAA and SpaceX are working closely together to finalize the plans for the next mission, and the new Glen Rocket System is still under development right now. They haven't launched 1 yet, but they're hoping to possibly do one by the end of this year.
So we're looking forward to that because when they can launch the rocket, then they can launch their lunar Rover, their lunar Lander, and they can also have variants of the rocket that can go into the outer solar system, which will be absolutely amazing. O these cargo missions for NASA are important for Blue Origin and also imortant for SpaceX, but most imortantly they are important for AU presence on the lunar surface. Hey, thank you so much for
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