{"id":127701,"date":"2021-09-15T14:24:51","date_gmt":"2021-09-15T21:24:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/nasa-awards-spacex-blue-origin-and-3-other-companies-146-million-in-contracts-to-make-moon-lander-designs"},"modified":"2021-09-15T14:24:51","modified_gmt":"2021-09-15T21:24:51","slug":"nasa-awards-spacex-blue-origin-and-3-other-companies-146-million-in-contracts-to-make-moon-lander-designs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/09\/nasa-awards-spacex-blue-origin-and-3-other-companies-146-million-in-contracts-to-make-moon-lander-designs","title":{"rendered":"NASA awards SpaceX, Blue Origin, and 3 other companies $146 million in contracts to make moon lander designs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/nasa-awards-spacex-blue-origin-and-3-other-companies-146-million-in-contracts-to-make-moon-lander-designs2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Going to hear the SpaceX fans complaining about this but it actually makes perfect sense. SpaceX is already \u201cdeep into development\u201d of the vehicle they plan on using for a lander therefore they don\u2019t get as much money as a group that hasn\u2019t started on development yet. Keep in mind that NASA is well aware that SpaceX is already using their money to develop Starship and SuperHeavy so there is no real need to \u2018double-down\u2019 on taxpayer development funding to a company that is already spending that money on that development.<\/p>\n<p>One need look no further than the \u201crace\u201d between SpaceX and Boeing over Commercial Crew. Dragon had been in development since 2004 (and funded by NASA since 2006 or cargo and 2010 for crew) while Boeing only started development of Starliner in 2010. SpaceX took 4 years longer than planned for the Cargo version, (2006 scheduled but didn\u2019t fly till 2010) and a full decade after that using the same basic design to fly crewed (2020) Boeing\u2019s Starliner, even if it doesn\u2019t fly this year is still ahead of SpaceX\u2019s development.<\/p>\n<p>It should be rather telling that SpaceX got the lowest award of all the contracts. Starship has always been the \u2018outlier\u2019 of the lander designs.<\/p>\n<hr>\n<p>Both Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos\u2019 Blue Origin will design moon landers that NASA can use to regularly send astronauts to the moon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Going to hear the SpaceX fans complaining about this but it actually makes perfect sense. SpaceX is already \u201cdeep into development\u201d of the vehicle they plan on using for a lander therefore they don\u2019t get as much money as a group that hasn\u2019t started on development yet. Keep in mind that NASA is well aware [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":627,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2019,1514],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-127701","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-elon-musk","category-space-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127701","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/627"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=127701"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127701\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=127701"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=127701"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=127701"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}