Moon fight: Blue Origin, Dynetics protest NASA’s SpaceX contract

When the US space agency chose only Elon Musk’s firm to help put astronauts on the moon again, the two other firms in the space race cried foul. The National Team, a multi-company partnership spearheaded by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, and Alabama-based defence contractor Dynetics are both crying foul about a contract awarded to Elon Musk’s SpaceX last month for $2.9bn. Both Dynetics and Blue Origin have filed protests with the US Government Accountability Office against NASA, with Bezos’s company accusing the space agency of having “moved the goalposts at the last minute”. SpaceX plans to use a variant of its Starship as the proposed human landing system, which Blue Origin claims is “incompatible with other US commercial launch vehicles, further restricting NASA’s alternatives and entrenching SpaceX’s monopolistic control of NASA deep space exploration”. This marked the end of SpaceX’s first long-duration mission for NASA and is one of three different crewed missions the company has launched for the space agency in less than a year.