blue moon

Why is Bezos trolling Musk on X with turtle pics? Because he has a new Moon plan.

artemis, blue moon, blue origin, Space, spacex / Shannon Garcia / February 13, 2026

“It’s time to go back to the Moon—this time to stay.”

Step by step, ferociously? Credit: Jeff Bezos/X

The founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, does not often post on the social media site owned by his rival Elon Musk. But on Monday, Bezos did, sharing a black-and-white image of a turtle emerging from the shadows on X.

The photo, which included no text, may have stumped some observers. Yet for anyone familiar with Bezos’ privately owned space company, Blue Origin, the message was clear. The company’s coat of arms prominently features two turtles, a reference to one of Aesop’s Fables, “The Tortoise and the Hare,” in which the slow and steady tortoise wins the race over a quicker but overconfident hare.

Bezos’ foray into social media turtle trolling came about 12 hours after Musk made major waves in the space community by announcing that SpaceX was pivoting toward the Moon, rather than Mars, as a near-term destination. It represented a huge shift in Musk’s thinking, as the SpaceX founder has long spoken of building a multi-planetary civilization on Mars.

Welcome to the Club

It must have provided Bezos with some self-satisfaction. He is also a believer in human settlement of space, but he has espoused the view that our spacefaring species should begin on the Moon and then build orbital space habitats. Back in 2019, when unveiling his vision, Bezos spoke about NASA’s goal of returning humans to the Moon through the Artemis Program. “I love this,” Bezos said. “It’s the right thing to do. We can help meet that timeline but only because we started three years ago. It’s time to go back to the Moon—this time to stay.”

So in posting an image of a turtle, Bezos was sending a couple of messages to Musk. First, it was something of a sequel to Bezos’ infamous “Welcome to the Club” tweet more than a decade ago. And secondly, Bezos was telling Musk that slow and steady wins the race. In other words, Bezos believes Blue Origin will beat SpaceX back to the Moon.

Why would Bezos, whose company has launched to orbit all of two times, think Blue Origin has a chance to compete with SpaceX (which has more than 600 orbital launches) to land humans on the Moon?

The answer can be found in a pair of documents obtained by Ars that outline an accelerated Artemis architecture that Blue Origin is now developing.

Some background on the Human Landing System

A little more than five years ago, NASA reached out to the US commercial space industry for help in building a lunar lander. This lander would dock with NASA’s Orion spacecraft to carry humans from an elliptical orbit around the Moon, known as a near-rectilinear halo orbit, down to the lunar surface and back up to Orion.

The story of what happened as part of this bidding process is long and convoluted (including lawsuits and remarkable graphics like this one from Blue Origin). However, what really matters is that, by 2023, both SpaceX and Blue Origin had contracts from NASA to develop lunar landers—SpaceX with Starship and Blue Origin with Blue Moon MK2—for crewed missions as part of the Artemis Program. Both mission architectures required propellant refueling, essentially the launch of “tankers” from Earth to transfer large amounts of fuel and oxidizer into low-Earth orbit to complete a lunar landing. SpaceX was considered to have a considerable lead on Blue Origin.

In 2025, again for complex reasons, it became clear that while these reusable landers were fantastic for a long-term lunar program, there were two problems. The first was that SpaceX blew up three Starships during testing last year, raising serious questions about whether the company would be ready to complete a lunar landing before 2030. And second, it was becoming clear that China may well have a simpler lander that could put taikonauts on the Moon before 2030.

Blue’s new plan

Last October, Ars revealed that Blue Origin was beginning to work on an “accelerated” architecture that could potentially land humans on the Moon before 2030 without requiring orbital refueling. Now, thanks to some new documents, we know what those landings could look like. The screenshots shared with Ars show two different missions, an uncrewed “demo” flight and a crewed Moon landing. Here’s what they entail:

Uncrewed demo mission: This requires three launches of the New Glenn rocket. The first two launches each put a “Transfer stage” into low-Earth orbit. The third launch puts a “Blue Moon MK2-IL” into orbit. (The “IL” stands for Initial Lander, and it appears to be a smaller version of the Blue Moon MK2 lander.) All three vehicles dock, and the first transfer stage boosts the stack to an elliptical orbit around Earth (after this, the stage burns up in Earth’s atmosphere). The second transfer stage then boosts the MK-2 lander from Earth orbit into a 15×100 km orbit above the Moon. From here, the MK-2 lander separates and goes down to the Moon, later ascending back to low-lunar orbit.

Crewed demo mission: This requires four launches of the New Glenn rocket. The first three launches each put a “Transfer stage” into low-Earth orbit. A fourth launch puts the MK2-IL lander into orbit and the vehicles dock. The first transfer stage pushes the stack into an elliptical Earth orbit. The second transfer stage pushes the stack to rendezvous with Orion in a near-rectilinear halo orbit. After the crew boards, the third and final transfer stage pushes the MK-2 lander into a low-lunar orbit before separating. The lander goes down to the Moon and then ascends to re-rendezvous with Orion.

A rendering of Blue Origin’s proposed Lunar Transporter. Credit: Blue Origin

The documents Ars has reviewed do not contain some crucial information. For example, what are the “transfer stages” they refer to? Are they the Lunar Transporter, a reusable space tug, under development? Or a modified upper stage of New Glenn or something else? It’s also unclear whether the Blue Moon MK2-IL is more like the simpler MK1 lander (which should fly soon) or if it will require major development work. Ars put these and other questions to Blue Origin, which declined to comment for this article.

So what to make of all this?

Sources indicated that Blue Origin is moving aggressively forward on its lunar program. This is one reason why the company recently iced its New Shepard spacecraft and has curtailed other activities to increase focus on major goals, including ramping up New Glenn cadence and accelerating lunar plans. This new architecture is one result of that.

There are major steps to go. The company must demonstrate the Blue Moon vehicle with the uncrewed MK1 mission, which likely will launch sometime late this spring or during the summer, with a lunar landing to follow. And although there is no orbital refueling as part of this new plan, it still requires complex docking and deep-space maneuvers, which Blue Origin has no experience with. Whether Bezos’ company could pull off all of these challenging tasks before 2030 is far from certain.

But one thing is clear. The 21st century space race back to the Moon now includes three participants: China’s state-run program, SpaceX, and Blue Origin. Game on.

Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica, covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA policy, and author of two books: Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX; and Reentry, on the development of the Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon. A certified meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston.

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Blue Origin aims to land next New Glenn booster, then reuse it for Moon mission

artemis, blue moon, blue origin, human landing system, Jeff Bezos, launch, moon, Science, Space / DJ Henderson / October 3, 2025

“We fully intend to recover the New Glenn first stage on this next launch.”

New Glenn lifts off on its debut flight on January 16, 2025. Credit: Blue Origin

There’s a good bit riding on the second launch of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.

Most directly, the fate of a NASA science mission to study Mars’ upper atmosphere hinges on a successful launch. The second flight of Blue Origin’s heavy-lifter will send two NASA-funded satellites toward the red planet to study the processes that drove Mars’ evolution from a warmer, wetter world to the cold, dry planet of today.

A successful launch would also nudge Blue Origin closer to winning certification from the Space Force to begin launching national security satellites.

But there’s more on the line. If Blue Origin plans to launch its first robotic Moon lander early next year—as currently envisioned—the company needs to recover the New Glenn rocket’s first stage booster. Crews will again dispatch Blue Origin’s landing platform into the Atlantic Ocean, just as they did for the first New Glenn flight in January.

The debut launch of New Glenn successfully reached orbit, a difficult feat for the inaugural flight of any rocket. But the booster fell into the Atlantic Ocean after three of the rocket’s engines failed to reignite to slow down for landing. Engineers identified seven changes to resolve the problem, focusing on what Blue Origin calls “propellant management and engine bleed control improvements.”

Relying on reuse

Pat Remias, Blue Origin’s vice president of space systems development, said Thursday that the company is confident in nailing the landing on the second flight of New Glenn. That launch, with NASA’s next set of Mars probes, is likely to occur no earlier than November from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida.

“We fully intend to recover the New Glenn first stage on this next launch,” Remias said in a presentation at the International Astronautical Congress in Sydney. “Fully intend to do it.”

Blue Origin, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, nicknamed the booster stage for the next flight “Never Tell Me The Odds.” It’s not quite fair to say the company’s leadership has gone all-in with their bet that the next launch will result in a successful booster landing. But the difference between a smooth touchdown and another crash landing will have a significant effect on Bezos’ Moon program.

That’s because the third New Glenn launch, penciled in for no earlier than January of next year, will reuse the same booster flown on the upcoming second flight. The payload on that launch will be Blue Origin’s first Blue Moon lander, aiming to become the largest spacecraft to reach the lunar surface. Ars has published a lengthy feature on the Blue Moon lander’s role in NASA’s effort to return astronauts to the Moon.

“We will use that first stage on the next New Glenn launch,” Remias said. “That is the intent. We’re pretty confident this time. We knew it was going to be a long shot [to land the booster] on the first launch.”

A long shot, indeed. It took SpaceX 20 launches of its Falcon 9 rocket over five years before pulling off the first landing of a booster. It was another 15 months before SpaceX launched a previously flown Falcon 9 booster for the first time.

With New Glenn, Blue’s engineers hope to drastically shorten the learning curve. Going into the second launch, the company’s managers anticipate refurbishing the first recovered New Glenn booster to launch again within 90 days. That would be a remarkable accomplishment.

Dave Limp, Blue Origin’s CEO, wrote earlier this year on social media that recovering the booster on the second New Glenn flight will “take a little bit of luck and a lot of excellent execution.”

On September 26, Blue Origin shared this photo of the second New Glenn booster on social media.

Blue Origin’s production of second stages for the New Glenn rocket has far outpaced manufacturing of booster stages. The second stage for the second flight was test-fired in April, and Blue completed a similar static-fire test for the third second stage in August. Meanwhile, according to a social media post written by Limp last week, the body of the second New Glenn booster is assembled, and installation of its seven BE-4 engines is “well underway” at the company’s rocket factory in Florida.

The lagging production of New Glenn boosters, known as GS1s (Glenn Stage 1s), is partly by design. Blue Origin’s strategy with New Glenn has been to build a small number of GS1s, each of which is more expensive and labor-intensive than SpaceX’s Falcon 9. This approach counts on routine recoveries and rapid refurbishment of boosters between missions.

However, this strategy comes with risks, as it puts the booster landings in the critical path for ramping up New Glenn’s launch rate. At one time, Blue aimed to launch eight New Glenn flights this year; it will probably end the year with two.

Laura Maginnis, Blue Origin’s vice president of New Glenn mission management, said last month that the company was building a fleet of “several boosters” and had eight upper stages in storage. That would bode well for a quick ramp-up in launch cadence next year.

However, Blue’s engineers haven’t had a chance to inspect or test a recovered New Glenn booster. Even if the next launch concludes with a successful landing, the rocket could come back to Earth with some surprises. SpaceX’s initial development of Falcon 9 and Starship was richer in hardware, with many boosters in production to decouple successful landings from forward progress.

Blue Moon

All of this means a lot is riding on an on-target landing of the New Glenn booster on the next flight. Separate from Blue Origin’s ambitions to fly many more New Glenn rockets next year, a good recovery would also mean an earlier demonstration of the company’s first lunar lander.

The lander set to launch on the third New Glenn mission is known as Blue Moon Mark 1, an unpiloted vehicle designed to robotically deliver up to 3 metric tons (about 6,600 pounds) of cargo to the lunar surface. The spacecraft will have a height of about 26 feet (8 meters), taller than the lunar lander used for NASA’s Apollo astronaut missions.

The first Blue Moon Mark 1 is funded from Blue Origin’s coffers. It is now fully assembled and will soon ship to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston for vacuum chamber testing. Then, it will travel to Florida’s Space Coast for final launch preparations.

“We are building a series, not a singular lander, but multiple types and sizes and scales of landers to go to the Moon,” Remias said.

The second Mark 1 lander will carry NASA’s VIPER rover to prospect for water ice at the Moon’s south pole in late 2027. Around the same time, Blue will use a Mark 1 lander to deploy two small satellites to orbit the Moon, flying as low as a few miles above the surface to scout for resources like water, precious metals, rare Earth elements, and helium-3 that could be extracted and exploited by future explorers.

A larger lander, Blue Moon Mark 2, is in an earlier stage of development. It will be human-rated to land astronauts on the Moon for NASA’s Artemis program.

Blue Origin’s Blue Moon MK1 lander, seen in the center, is taller than NASA’s Apollo lunar lander, currently the largest spacecraft to have landed on the Moon. Blue Moon MK2 is even larger, but all three landers are dwarfed in size by SpaceX’s Starship. Credit: Blue Origin

NASA’s other crew-rated lander will be derived from SpaceX’s Starship rocket. But Starship and Blue Moon Mark 2 are years away from being ready to accommodate a human crew, and both require orbital cryogenic refueling—something never before attempted in space—to transit out to the Moon.

This has led to a bit of a dilemma at NASA. China is also working on a lunar program, eyeing a crew landing on the Moon by 2030. Many experts say that, as of today, China is on pace to land astronauts on the Moon before the United States.

Of course, 12 US astronauts walked on the Moon in the Apollo program. But no one has gone back since 1972, and NASA and China are each planning to return to the Moon to stay.

One way to speed up a US landing on the Moon might be to use a modified version of Blue Origin’s Mark 1 lander, Ars reported Thursday.

If this is the path NASA takes, the stakes for the next New Glenn launch and landing will soar even higher.

Stephen Clark is a space reporter at Ars Technica, covering private space companies and the world’s space agencies. Stephen writes about the nexus of technology, science, policy, and business on and off the planet.

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