NASA has announced that it has awarded one of its Flight Opportunities program contracts to Blue Origin, the aeronautics firm headed by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

According to NASA, the contract will enable Blue Origin to “integrate and fly technology payloads near the boundary of space.” Blue Origin is the sixth private aeronautics company to be awarded such a contract, along with Masten Space Systems Inc, Near Space Corp, UP Aerospace Inc, Virgin Galactic, and World View Enterprises Inc.

“We are pleased to have Blue Origin join our cadre of Flight Opportunities service providers,” said Steve Jurczyk, associate administrator for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate (STMD) in Washington. “Adding additional flight providers enables NASA and the broader aerospace community to demonstrate and transition space technologies, developing new capabilities faster and, potentially, at lower cost.”

The Flight Opportunities program provides NASA with a variety of vendors capable of delivering its payloads into space, but the main purpose of the program is to allow private companies to demonstrate and validate their spacefaring technology.

Blue Origin bills itself as “an affordable, customizable platform for getting your payload to space quickly,” promising that researchers will be able to conduct experiments multiple times in space thanks to the relatively low cost of the service and the frequency with which it launches its rockets.

According to Blue Origin’s website, its platform is capable of supporting experiments up to 50 pounds in weight, and it comes with a full suite of valuable data, including vehicle telemetry information from the duration of the experiment. The company notes that researchers own the rights to all data gathered by its platform.

Image courtesy of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration