Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin to build orbiter for NASA before Mars missions

Hear this story NASA has awarded Blue Origin a $700 million contract to build a Mars orbiter. The spacecraft will provide navigation and communication services between Earth and Mars. The orbiter is scheduled to be operational around Mars by 2030. This project is part of NASA's broader plan to send astronauts to Mars in the 2030s. If NASA wants to send humans to Mars in the years ahead, the space agency will need a reliable way for those astronauts to communicate with Earth.

To that end, NASA has tapped Blue Origin to develop the agency's newest spacecraft that could by 2030 be orbiting the red planet and beaming back valuable data . Blue Origin, the space technology company that Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos founded in 2000, has a little more than two years to get the Mars orbiter ready for NASA.