This newly announced competition will be open to all American companies except SpaceX. That craft will have the ability to dock with Gateway, the small moon-orbiting space station that NASA plans to build, and take people and scientific gear from there to the surface (and back). If all goes according to plan, NASA will pick the builder of the new vehicle in early 2023. NASA plans to release a draft request for proposals (RFP) for the second moon lander by the end of the month and a final RFP later this spring, agency officials said. "I think you'll find it's an indication that there are good things to come for this agency and, if we're right, good things to come for all of humanity." "So what we're doing today is a bit of a preview," Nelson said. "And we're expecting to get this competition started in the fiscal year 23 budget."Įxact funding amounts and other details should be coming next week when the White House releases its 2023 federal budget request, he added. "We're expecting to have both Congress support and that of the Biden administration," Nelson said. The funding increase attached to this order was quite small - but NASA apparently now has assurances that the necessary money will come to support the second lander.Ĭongress is "committed to ensuring that we have more than one lander to choose for future missions," Nelson said during a news conference today, citing conversations he's had with people on Capitol Hill over the past year. In October 2021, the Senate Appropriations Committee directed NASA to choose a second company to develop a crewed moon lander. There were even more twists to come, however. Along with a public letter from Bezos to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson criticizing the decision, Blue Origin filed a lawsuit, which ultimately failed but held up SpaceX's lander development work for about seven months. That decision spurred protests from the other two finalists for the award, Dynetics and Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. But Congress didn't allocate enough funding to support the development of multiple vehicles, so NASA went solely with SpaceX in April 2021. NASA originally intended to select multiple private crewed landers for Artemis, to have redundancy in place and to drive the teams building the vehicles through competition. This new plan isn't all that new, however. Read the full copy of Blue Origin’s redacted lawsuit below."We expect to have two companies safely carry astronauts in their landers to the surface of the moon under NASA's guidance before we ask for services, which could result in multiple experienced providers in the market," Watson-Morgan added. SpaceX was competing with Blue Origin and Dynetics for what was expected to be two contracts, before NASA awarded only a single contract due to a lower-than-expected allocation for the program from Congress. The congressional watchdog’s ruling backed the space agency’s surprise announcement in April that NASA awarded SpaceX with a lunar lander contract worth about $2.9 billion. Government Accountability Office denied the company’s protest, upholding NASA’s decision. “Historically a staunch advocate for prioritizing safety, NASA inexplicably disregarded key flight safety requirements for only SpaceX, in order to select and make award to a SpaceX proposal that assessed as tremendously high risk and immensely complex, even before the waiver of safety requirements,” Blue Origin said in the lawsuit filed in August.īlue Origin’s complaint came after the U.S. Federal Court of Claims on Wednesday released a redacted version of the lawsuit by Jeff Bezos‘ Blue Origin against NASA over the lucrative lunar lander contract awarded to Elon Musk’s SpaceX earlier this year.
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