NASA Will Soon Choose One of These 3 Landers to Go Back to the Moon

upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

NASA Will Soon Choose One of These 3 Landers to Go Back to the Moon:

America's going back to the moon. It's been over 50 years since the Apollo missions, when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first people to walk on the moon in 1969. Both NASA and the current administration have decided it's high time people walked on the moon again-this time, importantly, those people won't just be men.

[...] In April 2020, the agency awarded a total of $967 million in contracts to three different private companies, giving them less than a year to come up with a lander design. Now the time has almost come to pick one of those three. Here are the contenders.

Blue Origin [...] The vertical crew cabin would require astronauts to descend to the moon's surface on a long ladder, which could be seen as an advantage because the crew is safer being high up.

Dynetics [...] Dynetics' is a single module with thrusters and propellant tanks on either side. It's specifically designed to be reusable for repeated exploration of the moon, and it's the only one of the three contenders with a horizontal crew cabin. [...]

SpaceX [...] the biggest and flashiest lunar lander. It's so tall, in fact, that astronauts would use an elevator to get from the crew cabin down to the moon's surface.

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