The Verge By Joey Roulette Jan 31, 2021
NASA needs more time to pick its ride to the moonNASA last week quietly delayed its plan to award two high-profile crewed lunar lander contracts, moving the finish line back two months for a crucial program under the Trump administration’s hasty timeline to get astronauts on the moon in 2024. 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.
The delay was all but certain: The spending bill Congress passed in December gives NASA $850 million for the Human Landing System program, far short of the $3.2 billion it needed to stick with the 2024 timeline. But NASA remained committed to the February award date and, similarly, the 2024 moonshot. A delay was also expected as Biden’s team holds off on releasing any space policy and focuses more on climate change and curbing the pandemic, keeping the long-term fate of NASA’s Artemis program uncertain.
More:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/1/31/22258815/nasa-moon-lander-awards-biden-spacex-blue-origin-moonshot
