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. <br /><br />However, Bezos is now making an extraordinary offer to try to win the contract after already losing it. Here are the details:<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />These three elements would be launched separately and link up in Earth orbit. <br /><br />This is where the Transfer Element would be used to transport the whole package to the moon. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />The Transfer Element would then take the astronauts and their Ascent Element back to Earth. <br /><br />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. <br /><br />After re-entry, the Ascent Element would deploy large parachutes to land on Earth's surface. <br /><br />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.
