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SpaceX was awarded an exclusive $ 2.9 billion contract Friday to help NASA return to the moon.
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NASA and SpaceX negotiated a contract excluding Blue Origin based on the high initial offer.
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“We are looking for more information on the squad,” a Blue Origin spokesperson told Insider.
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Many figures in the space and science communities are looking for more detail on how NASA chose SpaceX alone for its return to the moon, when the agency’s plans called for two commercial partners.
SpaceX competed with Blue Origin and Dynetics for a few contracts for NASA’s Artemis program. But NASA announced Friday that SpaceX would be awarded a $ 2.9 billion exclusive contract.
Blue Origin partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to form “The National Team”.
A Blue Origin spokesperson told Insider via email on Saturday, “The national team doesn’t have much information yet. We are looking for more information on the squad.”
Elsewhere, parties were in order.
“NASA Rules !!” SpaceX founder Elon Musk said. “We are honored to be part of the @ NASAArtemis team.”
NASA last year chose the three companies to develop a new “ human landing system, ” or HLS in NASA’s shorthand. The agency has plans to return to the moon in 2024 and eventually establish a permanent base there.
Founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin named its lunar lander Blue Moon. Dynetics, a defense contractor, called his design the Dynetics Human Landing System.
The winning HLS, SpaceX’s Starship, uses the company’s Raptor engines, along with designs from the Falcon 9 and Dragon vehicles, NASA said. It will be completely reusable, with a landing system designed “for travel to the Moon, Mars and other destinations.”
“By partnering with the industry while leveraging NASA’s proven technical expertise and capabilities, we will once again bring US astronauts to the surface of the moon, this time to explore new areas for longer periods of time,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s HLS program manager, in a statement.
NASA was expected to choose two of the companies. But budget concerns led to his choice of SpaceX, which restructured its proposal to meet NASA’s spending expectations, the agency said.
NASA chose SpaceX as a “conditional selection” on April 2, allowing the agency to begin post-selection negotiations with the agency, according to a document prepared by Kathryn Lueders, Source Selection Authority.
Lueders wrote that each of the three companies’ “Option A” proposals exceeded the agency’s proposed budget for the HLS program.
Lueders added, “ That is why I was determined that as a first step, NASA would open price negotiations with the Option A provider that scored very highly both technically and management, and also had the lowest price by a wide margin. originally proposed price – SpaceX. “
According to NASA, Musk’s company then resubmitted its proposal on April 7.
“While SpaceX’s revised proposal included an updated phasing of milestone payments that fits within NASA’s current budget, SpaceX did not propose a general price cut,” Lueders wrote.
After the announcement, SpaceX employees and space enthusiasts flooded Linkedin and Twitter with positive messages. Rocket emojis posted a lot, as expected.
But other space enthusiasts and budget grubs questioned NASA’s decision to go to one commercial partner for such a monumental mission.
Casey Dreier, lead attorney and senior space policy adviser at The Planetary Society, said via Twitter that he was “really shocked” that NASA would choose one commercial partner. Multiple partners would boost competition, he said.
“SpaceX, of course, always acts as if it were a constant competition with itself. And it has so far been 100% delivered in terms of capabilities and price,” said Dreier.
Rep. Robert Aderholt, of Alabama, released a statement saying NASA’s decision “raised a lot of questions.”
SpaceX had previously signed deals with NASA and the US Air Force, with “very high” price tags, he said.
He added, “The years of delay in development of the Falcon Heavy, as well as the recent testing of the Starship program, as reported in the news, also raise technical and planning questions.”
Several prototypes of SpaceX’s Starship have exploded during test flights.
Dynetics did not return a request for comment on Saturday.
Read the original Business Insider article