NASA opens way for additional moon landers after SpaceX contract win

The White House budget request includes about $1.5 billion in funding for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration moon-lander program, according to materials the space agency released Monday. For its last fiscal year, the agency received about $1.2 billion for those efforts, a spokesman said.

NASA is pushing to take astronauts back to the lunar surface for the first time in decades. This year the agency plans to test its Space Launch System, a giant rocket developed by companies including the Boeing Co., used to blast a spacecraft built by Lockheed Martin Corp around the Moon .

NASA has said that this no-crew launch will serve as a prelude to a mission for 2025, when SpaceX will take two astronauts to its lander in lunar orbit and take them to the surface of the Moon.

NASA selected a Starship vehicle built by SpaceX to launch that mission about a year ago, earning the company a $2.9 billion contract. SpaceX backtracked on proposals from a team including Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin LLC, as well as Dianetics, a unit of Leidos Holdings Inc., which handles a number of projects for defense and other government clients.

The space agency has said in the past that SpaceX’s award was a first step and confirmed last week that it would be seeking fresh proposals from companies other than SpaceX to build a second lander.

NASA officials declined to specify how much funding would be applied to the new lander bidding, saying specifying an amount could change how the purchases work.

Congress appropriates how much government agencies have to spend, so NASA’s final budget may differ from what the White House requested.

“We think, and Congress, too, that this competition leads to better, more reliable results,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said at a briefing last week. “I promised competition, so here it is.”

Bidding for the second lander vehicle is likely to come with offers from space companies such as Blue Origin, which was part of a team that did not win NASA funding under the agency’s previous contract effort. “Blue Origin is ready to compete,” the company said.

A spokesperson for Leidos said the company looks forward to reviewing the agency’s upcoming request for proposals. A Boeing spokesman said the company continually evaluates contract opportunities for NASA missions. According to a NASA document, Boeing submitted a lander proposal during the first part of the procurement round that SpaceX eventually won.

In addition to soliciting proposals for a second lander, NASA officials said last week the agency would give Space Exploration Technologies Corp. the formal name for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which will give more people working on the Moon under its current contract.

Working with NASA to bring astronauts to the lunar surface—something the agency hasn’t done since 1972—is a high-profile job space companies and officials closely track. NASA is building towards a return to the Moon as part of its Artemis program, hiring space enterprises and aerospace contractors to build the vehicles and infrastructure for such flights.

NASA said in a purchase document last year that it was a longstanding strategy to pick two winners to handle the moon-lander mission, but budget constraints kept the agency from taking that approach. Instead, as a first step, it chose to start working with SpaceX, which had offered the lowest initial price as part of that bid, the document said.

The agency’s decision to hire only SpaceX drew opposition from Dianetics and Blue Origin, but was overruled by a Government Accountability Office.

Mr Bezos pushed to win funding for the lander’s work last summer, cutting up to $2 billion in payments over a nearly two-year period from a bid submitted to the agency by Blue Origin’s team in an open letter to NASA. offered to do. Blue Origin also sued the federal government last summer over NASA’s decision to award Moon-lander work to SpaceX. A federal judge later dismissed that case.

In a program NASA released Monday, the agency showed the operation of an unidentified lander in 2028. The agency has said that future landers will be able to dock with Gateway, a planned space station that will orbit the Moon and serve as a station for astronauts. lunar surface.