A private team led by Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company Blue Origin has delivered a mock-up of its crewed moon lander to NASA for testing, Space reports.

In late April, NASA announced that it had awarded funding to three commercial groups — SpaceX, Dynetics and the Blue Origin-led "National Team" — to develop human landing systems for the agency's Artemis lunar exploration program.

These companies must work fast, given that NASA wants to land two astronauts near the moon's South Pole in 2024. And the National Team has now given the agency some hardware to work with: a full-scale engineering mock-up of its lunar lander, which was delivered to Johnson Space Center (JSC) in Houston today (Aug. 20).

"Testing this engineering mock-up for crew interaction is a step toward making this historic mission real," Brent Sherwood, Blue Origin's vice president of advanced development programs, said in a statement.

"The learning we get from full-scale mock-ups can’t be done any other way," Sherwood said. "Benefitting from NASA’s expertise and feedback at this early stage allows us to develop a safe commercial system that meets the agency’s needs."

The National Team consists of Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper. The companies are developing a landing system with three separate pieces: a descent element to carry astronauts to the lunar surface, an ascent element to launch them off the moon, and a transfer element, a propulsive stage that sends the descent element from lunar orbit down toward the gray dirt.