SpaceX has secured a $2.89 billion NASA contract to build spacecraft that will land astronauts on the moon for the first time in five decades
The fixed-price contract is a major vote of confidence for Elon Musk's rocket company, as the space agency is placing a large amount of responsibility for its cornerstone human spaceflight program, known as Artemis, on SpaceX. Friday's announcement is a blow to Blue Origin, the rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, which had proposed working as a "National Team" alongside corporate behemoths such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin to design and build a lunar lander, and to Alabama-based Dynetics, which had put in its own bid. But ultimately, SpaceX won with its bid to use of a spacecraft the company is already developing on its own in South Texas. That vehicle, called Starship, is also the linchpin of Musk's personal goal of landing the first humans on Mars. Test flights of early Starship prototypes have all ended in explosions thus far, but the company is rapidly building new test vehicles. How SpaceX and NASA overcame a bitter culture clash to bring back...