After losing to Elon Musk’s SpaceX in 2021, Bezos’ rocket company won the contract to take NASA astronauts to the moon before the end of the decade on its second try.
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NASA announced Friday morning that Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos’ company Blue Origin was awarded a contract upwards of $3 billion to develop a lunar lander for Artemis V—a mission scheduled to take astronauts to the moon in 2029—just two years after Bezos’ company lost a similar bid to billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX.Key Facts
The award to Blue Origin was just over $3.4 billion from NASA, and the company will also be contributing “well north of “$3.4 billion” to the mission, John Couluris, vice president of lunar transportation for Blue Origin, said Friday.
The Sustaining Lunar Development program Blue Origin won the contract through was a second-chance contest offered by NASA after Musk’s SpaceX was the only winner of the last crew lander contract in 2021; Musk’s contract was worth $2.89 billion.
