On the second attempt, Jeff Bezos and his rocket company won a contract to take NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon.
NASA announced Friday that it had awarded a contract to Mr. Bezos’ company, Blue Origin, to provide its Blue Moon lander for a lunar mission currently scheduled to launch in 2029.
The mission, Artemis V, is another key part of NASA’s Artemis program, which is to send astronauts back to the moon as part of an effort to explore the Antarctic. Astronauts will land on the moon in a vehicle built by SpaceX for the Artemis III and IV missions.
“We want more competition,” Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, said Friday at the event at NASA headquarters in Washington. “It means you have reliability. You have backups.”
NASA is paying $3.4 billion to Blue Origin, and John Couluris, Blue Origin’s vice president of lunar transportation, said the company contributed “well north” of that amount to the development effort.
Winning the contract could herald a promising recovery year for Blue Origin after a number of delays and setbacks. That includes the failure of one of its New Shepard vehicles, which travel to space but not to orbit, during a launch last September that had experiments on board but no passengers. Blue Origin has found the cause and hopes to resume New Shepard flights with both space tourists and science cargo later this year.
And some hardware manufactured by Blue Origin could finally be used for an orbital mission in the coming months. The company built engines for the booster stage of the Vulcan rocket being developed by the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
Blue Origin could also glimpse New Glenn, a much larger rocket that will launch payloads into orbit.
For the lunar lander contract, Blue Origin, working with other aerospace companies including Boeing and Lockheed Martin, beat a second team led by Dynetics, a defense company based in Huntsville, Ala. Dynetics, a subsidiary of Leidos of Reston, Va., had enlisted the help of aerospace contractor Northrop Grumman for its bid.
Blue Origin and Dynetics were disappointed losers in 2021 when NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build a variant of its giant Starship vehicle that would put astronauts on the moon for the first time in more than half a century to land.
The two companies protested the decision, especially since NASA officials originally wanted to award two contracts.
That would have been similar to NASA’s successful effort turning over the transportation of cargo and crew to the International Space Station to private companies. Competition helps reduce costs and provides redundancy if things go wrong, agency officials have said.
But by giving only one award to SpaceX, NASA officials said there wasn’t enough money in their budget for a second lander. SpaceX’s $2.9 billion bid was by far the lowest bid. Blue Origin’s proposed design had a $6 billion price tag, and Dynetics’ design was even more expensive.
The federal Government Accountability Office dismissed the two companies’ protests. Blue Origin then sued in federal court and lost again.
Last year, after winning a bigger budget from Congress, NASA announced a competition for a second lunar lander. Dynetics and Blue Origin decided to compete again, although there was some shuffling between the companies participating in the effort. Northrop Grumman, who was part of Blue Origin’s original proposal, moved to the Dynetics team.
Added Blue Origin to its Boeing team; Astrobotic, a small Pittsburgh company developing robotic lunar landers; and Honeybee Robotics, a space technology company bought by Blue Origin last year.
The Blue Origin lander, which is designed to take two astronauts to the south polar region of the moon, will not reach the moon for a while.
SpaceX’s initial $2.9 billion contract was to deliver the lander for the first lunar landing during Artemis III, currently scheduled for late 2025 but likely to be pushed back to 2026 or later. In November, NASA exercised a $1.15 billion option in that contract for SpaceX to also provide a lander for Artemis IV, a mission scheduled for 2028.
