“Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Wins $3.4 Billion NASA Contract for Manned Lunar Lander”

The moon is seen from the International Space Station on July 9, 2018.

Alexander Gerst | NASA

WASHINGTON — Jeff Bezos just got his Moon ticket from NASA.

Billionaire aerospace company Blue Origin won a major contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Friday to develop a manned lunar lander to deliver astronauts to the lunar surface later this decade under the agency’s Artemis program.

The effort led by Blue Origin is effectively a project worth over $7 billion. The NASA contract is worth more than $3.4 billion, officials said Friday, while Blue Origin vice president John Colores said the company would contribute “significantly” to the contract value as well.

“We are making additional investments in infrastructure that will pave the way for the first humans to land on Mars,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson when announcing the Blue Origin award. “Our shared aspirations today are no less exciting than when President Kennedy challenged a generation of dreamers to fly to the Moon.”

said Bezos in an Friday tweets He was “honored to be on this flight with @NASA to land astronauts on the moon – this time to stay.”

The team led by Blue Origin — which includes Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Draper, Astrobotic, and Honeybee Robotics — topped the proposal for a team led by Leidos’ Dainetics. Other proposals are expected, but likely won’t be revealed until NASA releases documents outlining the selection process.

The contest, known as the Sustaining Lunar Development (SLD) program, is essentially a second-chance contest organized by NASA after the Elon Musk-designed SpaceX program is the sole winner of the first crewed landing contract in 2021.

This first program, called the Human Landing System (HLS), awarded SpaceX a nearly $3 billion contract to develop a variant of the Starship rocket for the Artemis mission. Prior to the HLS award, NASA was expected to select two winners, but the agency’s budget at the time and SpaceX’s lowest-cost bid resulted in only one winner.

HLS and SLD are part of NASA’s Artemis program to land astronauts on the moon, and the agency hopes to begin flying crews to the lunar surface in the next few years. In December, NASA completed its first Artemis mission, which carried no people, and flew its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft around the Moon for the first time.

Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX (left), and founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos.

Getty’s image

Last year, Nelson explained the rationale behind the second bidding process to add a privately-built moon lander, saying, “Competition was critical to our success.”

“We can tap into that money by working with the commercial industry and, through competition, bringing those costs down to NASA,” Nelson said in Senate testimony in 2022.

Meanwhile, SpaceX continued development of the nearly 400-foot Starship rocket. In April, the company attempted to reach space in the vehicle for the first time. Recently, Musk estimated that SpaceX will spend around $2 billion on Starship development this year, and expects the company to reach Earth orbit with its next launch.

Last year, NASA awarded SpaceX an additional $1.15 billion under the HLS contract, with an option to purchase a second crewed demonstration landing from the company. This brings the total value of SpaceX’s HLS contracts to $4.2 billion through 2027.

To date, NASA has paid SpaceX about $1.8 billion under HLS, according to federal records.