NASA delays lunar lander contract award
NASA, now under the control of the Biden administration, has quietly delayed by at least two months the contract award to two companies to build manned lunar landers for its Artemis program.
With short funding from Congress and a new administration focused on more pressing national issues, the move was expected.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a team of aerospace giants led by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Leidos-owned Dynetics won a combined $967 million in seed funding from NASA last year to develop rivaling concepts for a human lunar landing system. It’s the space agency’s first effort to spend money on astronaut moon landers since the Apollo program in the 1970s.
Last Wednesday, NASA told the three contractors that an extension to their development contracts “will be required,” picking a new award date of April 30th. Under the Trump administration’s timeline, the agency had planned to pick two of the three bidders in late February, giving a stamp of approval for two systems that would inevitably carry humans to the moon.
This delay would likely have occurred under Trump as well, mainly because Congress only appropriated less than a third of the money needed for this Artemis program.
However, under Biden it was guaranteed. A major review is about to happen, designed not to kill Artemis but to slow it down appreciable. Congress likes the pork Artemis produces, but is wholly uninterested in it actually flying any dangerous missions. I suspect Biden will agree. The focus will once again shift back to Gateway, making any lunar landing require it so that it must be built first. Such a shift will guarantee that no American manned missions to the surface of the Moon will occur before ’30, but also allow the spending of gobs of money building a small lunar station that will only be occupied for short periods.
The big loser here, to my mind, is Jeff Bezos. His company, Blue Origin, was building the descent portion of the lunar lander, with all other portions built by his big space partners, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper. Not only is most of the other work by these partners more easily shifted to other uses related to Gateway, but those companies already have plenty of government contracts. As far as I can remember, Blue Origin has no other big government deals, with its New Glenn having been rejected by the military, and its lunar descent technology unneeded until there is a lunar landing, and I expect that to be significantly delayed.
For the past four years Bezos has clearly wanted to make Blue Origin a new big space contractor. Right now it appears that effort has failed wholly.
Dynetics will also lose out big, as they are a new company and can ill afford losing a contract here.
SpaceX will likely be hurt the least. Not getting any money for designing Starship to land on the Moon will do little to slow its development. Starship is almost completely privately funded, and does not need NASA money to get built.
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NASA, now under the control of the Biden administration, has quietly delayed by at least two months the contract award to two companies to build manned lunar landers for its Artemis program.
With short funding from Congress and a new administration focused on more pressing national issues, the move was expected.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX, a team of aerospace giants led by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, and Leidos-owned Dynetics won a combined $967 million in seed funding from NASA last year to develop rivaling concepts for a human lunar landing system. It’s the space agency’s first effort to spend money on astronaut moon landers since the Apollo program in the 1970s.
Last Wednesday, NASA told the three contractors that an extension to their development contracts “will be required,” picking a new award date of April 30th. Under the Trump administration’s timeline, the agency had planned to pick two of the three bidders in late February, giving a stamp of approval for two systems that would inevitably carry humans to the moon.
This delay would likely have occurred under Trump as well, mainly because Congress only appropriated less than a third of the money needed for this Artemis program.
However, under Biden it was guaranteed. A major review is about to happen, designed not to kill Artemis but to slow it down appreciable. Congress likes the pork Artemis produces, but is wholly uninterested in it actually flying any dangerous missions. I suspect Biden will agree. The focus will once again shift back to Gateway, making any lunar landing require it so that it must be built first. Such a shift will guarantee that no American manned missions to the surface of the Moon will occur before ’30, but also allow the spending of gobs of money building a small lunar station that will only be occupied for short periods.
The big loser here, to my mind, is Jeff Bezos. His company, Blue Origin, was building the descent portion of the lunar lander, with all other portions built by his big space partners, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper. Not only is most of the other work by these partners more easily shifted to other uses related to Gateway, but those companies already have plenty of government contracts. As far as I can remember, Blue Origin has no other big government deals, with its New Glenn having been rejected by the military, and its lunar descent technology unneeded until there is a lunar landing, and I expect that to be significantly delayed.
For the past four years Bezos has clearly wanted to make Blue Origin a new big space contractor. Right now it appears that effort has failed wholly.
Dynetics will also lose out big, as they are a new company and can ill afford losing a contract here.
SpaceX will likely be hurt the least. Not getting any money for designing Starship to land on the Moon will do little to slow its development. Starship is almost completely privately funded, and does not need NASA money to get built.
Please consider donating to Behind the Black, by giving either a one-time contribution or a regular subscription, as outlined in the tip jar below. Your support will allow me to continue covering science and culture as I have for the past twenty years, independent and free from any outside influence.
Your support is even more essential to me because I keep this site free from advertisements and do not participate in corrupt social media companies like Google, Twitter, and Facebook. I depend wholly on the direct support of my readers.
You can provide that support to Behind The Black with a contribution via Patreon or PayPal. To use Patreon, go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation. For PayPal click one of the following buttons:
If Patreon or Paypal don't work for you, you can support Behind The Black directly by sending your donation by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman, to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
SpaceX may not need NASA money to get Starship built, but it still needs gov’t approvals to test it and to fly it. Let’s hope those approvals will be forthcoming as the launch cadence increases. Let us also hope that gov’t regulatory agencies do not embark on a collaborative effort to inflict death by a thousand cuts on the Starship program
Dynetics will also lose out big, as they are a new company and can ill afford losing a contract here.
Dynetics is a new name to a lot of us, but they’ve actually been around since 1974. This is, however, their most ambitious space hardware initiative.
I still think they have a chance, since their lander is a lot cheaper than Blue Origin’s, and it’s almost entirely reusable. They also scored “very good” on the technical rating and management rating, which was acually the best of all three contractor teams. If a second lander system is wanted, they could be an affordable alternative to SpaceX.
The $1 billion per year Gateway project is a bargain compared to the $3.5 billion cost of Orion/ SLS.
The biggest winners of a slowdown of Project Artemis is Boeing and all those other subcontractors and NASA employees whose ricebowls are filled by the slow motion catastrophe of the Space Launch System project.
But as NASA now slows down to a Biden shuffle, SpaceX is also speeding up.
By the time the first token manned Orion lunar-flyby takes place, launched by SLS sometime around 2024, the contrast between the waste and sloth of NASA vs the speed and thrift of SpaceX will be blinding.
It didn’t have to be this way. Politicians did this. Biden will be responsible for the humiliation of NASA, and the fleecing of the taxpayer.
The focus will once again shift back to Gateway…
The focus has been on Gateway for the last three years.
…making any lunar landing require it so that it must be built first…
It already is being built first. The parts required for a lunar landing are under construction and scheduled for launch in 2023.
…but also allow the spending of gobs of money building a small lunar station that will only be occupied for short periods.
1100-day missions are planned with the Enhanced Habitation Capability.