NASA awards $146 million for human moon lander development

[Elderberry]

Space.com by By Mike Wall 9/15/2021

Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin got some of the cash this time.

NASA is awarding a total of $146 million to five American companies to support the development of crewed moon landers, agency officials announced Tuesday (Sept. 14).

The fixed-price, milestone-based contracts, awarded via NASA's Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) program, will fund work over the next 15 months. The companies getting money are:

•   Blue Origin Federation of Kent, Washington, $25.6 million;

•   Dynetics (a Leidos company) of Huntsville, Alabama, $40.8 million;

•   Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado, $35.2 million;

•   Northrop Grumman of Dulles, Virginia, $34.8 million;

•   SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, $9.4 million.

"These companies will make advancements toward sustainable human landing system concepts, conduct risk-reduction activities and provide feedback on NASA's requirements to cultivate industry capabilities for crewed lunar landing missions," agency officials said in a statement Tuesday.

More: https://www.space.com/nasa-artemis-human-moon-lander-contracts-september-2021

[Elderberry]

Blue Origin Wanted a $6 Billion NASA Contract—It Received a $26 Million One Instead

Observer by  Sissi Cao • 09/15/21

https://observer.com/2021/09/blue-origin-win-nasa-contract-moon-lander-concept-hls-dispute/

NASA announced Tuesday that it has awarded Blue Origin and four other companies a batch of contracts worth a combined $146 million to develop moon lander concepts that could potentially lead to actual landing system development in the future.

Blue Origin’s contract was $26.5 million. The other four companies are SpaceX ($9.4 million), Dynetics ($40.8 million), Lockheed Martin ($35.2 million) and Northrop Grumman ($34.8 million).

The contracts were awarded under NASA’s NextSTEP-2 (Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships) Appendix N: Sustainable Human Landing System Studies and Risk Reduction. It’s a different section under the Artemis Program from the Human Landing System (HLS) contract that was given to SpaceX earlier this year, for which Blue Origin and Dynetics both submitted competing proposals.

[Elderberry]

Space Race Snub: NASA Adds Insult to Jeff Bezos' Injury with Puny Blue Origin Contract

PJ Media By Stephen Green Sep 16, 2021

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2021/09/16/space-race-snub-nasa-adds-insult-to-jeff-bezos-injury-with-puny-blue-origin-contract-n1479264

For those of us closely following the new space race — the one between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, not the United States and Communist China — watching Bezos’s well-funded Blue Origin flounder year after year has been a huge disappointment.

Not because we’re pro-Bezos or anti-Musk, but because we really want everyone to succeed.

You see, we space nuts understand that there’s room for literally everyone in space, and the more launch capacity we develop, the sooner we become a deep space-faring and deep space-living species.

But here we are, 21 years (almost to the day) after Bezos put billions of his own money into Blue Origin, and the company has yet to lift a single gram into orbit.

[mountaineer]

Why?