As the U.S. races China to the Moon, two billionaires are locked in a space race of their own. NASA has offered both Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin a chance to return astronauts to the lunar surface, and the competition just got interesting.
A bombshell report by Ars Technica’s Eric Berger has revealed exactly how Blue Origin plans to beat SpaceX to a crewed Moon landing. Internal documents obtained by Ars reportedly detail the accelerated mission architecture Blue Origin will use to attempt to land astronauts on the Moon without the highly complex orbital refueling SpaceX’s approach requires.
Gizmodo could not independently verify the contents of the documents Ars reviewed, and Blue Origin did not respond to a request for comment.
The rivalry ramps up
Before we dive into Blue Origin’s new lunar strategy, a bit of context. On Sunday, Musk sent shockwaves through the spaceflight community by announcing that SpaceX—a company built on its founder’s dream of colonizing Mars—has pivoted toward building a Moon city instead.
The move marks a seismic shift in the company’s strategic vision. After all, it was only a year ago that Musk called the Moon a “distraction,” insisting that SpaceX is “going straight to Mars.” Still, it’s not altogether surprising, as Musk’s company is currently at risk of losing its Artemis 3 lunar lander contract to Blue Origin.
The morning after Musk announced SpaceX’s Moon pivot, Bezos posted an ominous photo of a turtle peering out from the shadows (this is relevant—promise). As Berger insightfully points out, the image—unccompanied by text—is almost certainly a nod to Blue Origin’s mascot: a tortoise. Bezos has previously explained that the tortoise is a reference to “The Tortoise and the Hare,” one of Aesop’s Fables.
It appears that in his eyes, Blue is the tortoise that will beat SpaceX—the hare—to a crewed lunar landing through slow and steady development.
NASA’s Artemis 3 mission will be the first to return humans to the Moon since the Apollo era. In 2021, the agency contracted SpaceX to build a crew lander for the mission, called the Starship Human Landing System (HLS). NASA originally hoped the lander would be ready in time to launch Artemis 3 by 2024, but significant developmental delays pushed the mission back to 2028 and prompted the agency to reopen the contract in October.
Since then, Blue has emerged as SpaceX’s competitor for the Artemis 3 lander contract. Bezos’s company is actively prepping its Blue Moon Mark 1 (MK1) cargo lander for its first test flight, slated to launch this year. Its success would pave the way for the MK2 crew lander, and if that vehicle is ready to fly before the Starship HLS, Musk can kiss his Artemis 3 contract goodbye.
Blue Origin’s new plan
Here’s how Blue Origin plans to pull this off. The documents reviewed by Ars reportedly detail two missions: an uncrewed demo mission and a crewed demo landing.
Berger reports that the uncrewed flight will require three launches of Blue’s New Glenn rocket. The first two will put two “transfer stages” (specialized upper stages designed to move a vehicle from one orbit to another) into low-Earth orbit, and the third will put a smaller version of the MK2 lander, called “Blue Moon MK2-IL,” into orbit. These three vehicles will dock to each other and the first transfer stage will boost them into an elliptical orbit around Earth.
The first stage will then separate and fall back to Earth, burning up in the atmosphere. That’s when the second transfer stage will take over, boosting the MK2-IL lander into an elliptical orbit around the Moon. The lander will then separate, descend to the lunar surface, and ascend back into low-lunar orbit.
The crewed landing will require four New Glenn launches, three to put three transfer stages into LEO and a fourth to launch MK2-IL and a docking port. All four vehicles will dock to the port. The first transfer stage will boost the stack into an elliptical Earth orbit, and the second will push it to rendezvous with NASA’s Orion spacecraft—carrying a crew of astronauts—in a specialized, highly stable orbit around the Moon.
Orion will dock with MK2-IL to allow the crew to board. The third transfer stage will then move MK2-IL into a low-lunar orbit and separate, allowing the lander to descend to the lunar surface and then ascend to re-rendezvous with Orion.
Sounds easy enough, right? Not quite. While this approach will not require orbital refueling, Blue Origin still must prove it can pull off complex dockings and deep-space maneuvers it has never attempted before, as Berger notes. So while Blue Origin is aiming for an uncrewed Moon landing later this year—potentially ahead of SpaceX’s 2027 target—both companies remain far from the finish line.
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![New ‘Gundam Wing’ ‘Visual Project’ in the Works
By the time Cartoon Network syndicated the 1995 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in the United States in the summer of 2000, the Gundam franchise was already hugely popular in Japan. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, however, was a watershed moment for the franchise in the West, introducing an entire generation of anime fans to Gundam specifically but also the mecha anime genre in general. It’s understandably something of a big deal to a lot of Western anime fans. But despite its massive influence, Gundam Wing had a relatively short run: just 49 episodes and four original video animations. There was a spate of manga adaptations in the ’90s, too, and a serial novel called Frozen Teardrop that ran from 2010 to 2015 in Gundam Ace, but for the most part, Gundam Wing has been content to let its legacy speak for itself. Until now, that is. During the spring 2026 Gundam Conference (via Comic Book), Bandai Namco announced that a new Gundam Wing “visual project” is in the works. When pressed for more details, Bandai Namco Filmworks producer Naohiro Ogata said, “I can’t say what the format is yet, but it is definitely something long.” The announcement on the official Gundam website is similarly light on details, but it’s still hugely exciting. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX8NQa1WWic[/embed] Gundam Wing follows five teenage mech pilots sent to Earth to free their home space colonies from the oppression of the United Earth Sphere Alliance. It’s set in an alternate timeline from the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, which first aired in Japan in 1979. Alternate timelines are pretty common in the world of Gundam, so it’s possible that the new project could go that route, though it’d be hard to sell as a Wing series specifically rather than a separate Gundam series.
The new project could also simply pick up where the anime left off or follow the plot of Frozen Teardrop, which was essentially a sequel story. It could even be a prequel, for all we know. With so little information revealed, the possibilities are endless about what this new Gundam Wing could be. That’s not going to stop us from being unreasonably excited about it, though. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Gundam #Wing #Visual #Project #WorksGundam,Gundam Wing New ‘Gundam Wing’ ‘Visual Project’ in the Works
By the time Cartoon Network syndicated the 1995 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam Wing in the United States in the summer of 2000, the Gundam franchise was already hugely popular in Japan. Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, however, was a watershed moment for the franchise in the West, introducing an entire generation of anime fans to Gundam specifically but also the mecha anime genre in general. It’s understandably something of a big deal to a lot of Western anime fans. But despite its massive influence, Gundam Wing had a relatively short run: just 49 episodes and four original video animations. There was a spate of manga adaptations in the ’90s, too, and a serial novel called Frozen Teardrop that ran from 2010 to 2015 in Gundam Ace, but for the most part, Gundam Wing has been content to let its legacy speak for itself. Until now, that is. During the spring 2026 Gundam Conference (via Comic Book), Bandai Namco announced that a new Gundam Wing “visual project” is in the works. When pressed for more details, Bandai Namco Filmworks producer Naohiro Ogata said, “I can’t say what the format is yet, but it is definitely something long.” The announcement on the official Gundam website is similarly light on details, but it’s still hugely exciting. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tX8NQa1WWic[/embed] Gundam Wing follows five teenage mech pilots sent to Earth to free their home space colonies from the oppression of the United Earth Sphere Alliance. It’s set in an alternate timeline from the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, which first aired in Japan in 1979. Alternate timelines are pretty common in the world of Gundam, so it’s possible that the new project could go that route, though it’d be hard to sell as a Wing series specifically rather than a separate Gundam series.
The new project could also simply pick up where the anime left off or follow the plot of Frozen Teardrop, which was essentially a sequel story. It could even be a prequel, for all we know. With so little information revealed, the possibilities are endless about what this new Gundam Wing could be. That’s not going to stop us from being unreasonably excited about it, though. Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel, Star Wars, and Star Trek releases, what’s next for the DC Universe on film and TV, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who. #Gundam #Wing #Visual #Project #WorksGundam,Gundam Wing](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/05/Mobile-Suit-Gundam-Wing-1280x853.jpg)
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