With all eyes on SpaceX’s efforts to get the Starship super rocket operational, many would be forgiven for imagining that Elon Musk’s company is all that exists in commercial space.

But other companies are also making strides that will help open the frontier of space to human activity and development. Some of that progress has to do not so much with how humans will return to the moon as with how they will live there.

One of the projects being undertaken by Blue Origin, the space company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is a device called Blue Alchemist. It is an attempt to access the moon’s natural resources in a single process and transform them into useful materials for future lunar settlers.

Blue Alchemist was awarded a $35 million NASA tipping point contract in July 2023 as a way to

See Full Page