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#The Wall Street Journal: Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin bids again for NASA lunar mission

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“The Wall Street Journal: Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin bids again for NASA lunar mission”

Jeff Bezos‘s space company said it is making another run at the moon, after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration chose rival SpaceX to handle a high-profile lunar mission last year.

Blue Origin LLC, the space company Bezos founded and has backed, said Tuesday in a tweet that it is part of a group that submitted a bid to develop a lunar lander capable of transporting NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon on future missions for Artemis, the agency’s space-exploration program. Blue Origin’s partners on its bid include Lockheed Martin Corp.
LMT,
-1.36%
and Boeing Co.
BA,
-3.60%.

Last year, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to use a version of the Elon Musk-led company’s planned Starship vehicle to handle that task, on a mission currently set for 2025.

NASA’s decision to issue a single contract for that lander drew a protest and a lawsuit from Blue Origin, both of which were unsuccessful. It also prompted Mr. Bezos to write a letter to NASA’s administrator, Bill Nelson. “Instead of investing in two competing lunar landers as originally intended, the agency chose to confer a multiyear, multibillion-dollar head start to SpaceX,” his letter from July of last year said.

An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.

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