Blue Origin’s BE-7 rocket engine goes through a test firing. (Blue Origin Photo)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos heralded progress in the development of the rocket engine designed for use in the Moon landing craft built by the Blue Origin space venture - but also offered a glimpse of the crystal ball for future lunar missions.

"This is the engine that will get the first woman to the surface of the moon," she wrote in an Instagram post about the hydrogen-fueled BE-7 engine.


At one level, the Instagram post - plus parallel updates from Blue Origin via Twitter and the Web - focuses on a new test round for the BE-7 at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama.


This week, the testing program launched a new set of tests.


"The thrust room has been tested for 20 seconds so far in this latest campaign," said Blue Origin. "This brings the cumulative test time on the BE-7 thrust chamber to 1,245 seconds."


As Bezos points out, the BE-7 was designed to reduce its power between 2,000 and 10,000 pounds of thrust, a key feature for achieving a precise landing on the moon. A single BE-7 will power the landing phase of the Blue Moon landing craft, part of NASA's proposed human landing system stack for use in the Artemis lunar program.


Blue Origin leads a "National Team" of space companies that includes Lockheed Martin (responsible for the ascension phase), Northrop Grumman (responsible for the transfer element that will move the spacecraft in lunar orbit), and Draper (responsible for aviation).


This brings us to a deeper level in Bezos' interpretation: The National Team is one of three competitors who provided the Artemis program's human landing system. An industry team led by SpaceX and Alabama-based Dynetics is also on the hunt.


NASA has yet to choose which team (or teams) will move to the next development stage. And even if more than one team is selected, it may not be immediately clear which team will build the landing vehicle used in the first crewed moon mission of the Artemis program, scheduled for early 2024.

Bezos puts his mouth where he has money, saying that the BE-7 is the "engine to bring the first woman to the moon". (NASA calls this "the first woman and the next man," recognizing the fact that the crew could possibly be diverse.)

Will Bezos be right in his prediction that the National Team will win NASA's competition and the Blue Moon ship will land the next moonwalker team to the moon's surface? We'll have learned more by February when the space agency chooses who will join the next round.