Stunning choice: Final yr, NASA awarded three totally different teams contracts to additional develop their very own proposals for lunar landers: $135 million to SpaceX, $253 million to protection firm Dynetics (which was working with Sierra Nevada Company), and $579 million to a four-company crew led by Blue Origin (working with Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and Draper). 

SpaceX didn’t simply obtain the least amount of cash—its proposal additionally earned the worst technical and administration scores. NASA’s affiliate administrator (now performing administrator) Steve Jurczyk wrote (pdf) that Starship’s propulsion system was “notably advanced and comprised of likewise advanced particular person subsystems which have but to be developed, examined, and authorized with little or no schedule margin to accommodate delays.” The uncertainties have been solely exacerbated by SpaceX’s notoriously poor monitor document with assembly deadlines.

What modified: Since then, SpaceX has gone by means of quite a lot of totally different flight exams of a number of full-scale Starship prototypes, together with a 10-kilometer high-altitude flight and protected touchdown in March. (It additionally exploded a number of occasions.) In accordance to the Washington Put up, paperwork counsel NASA was enamored with Starship’s capacity to ferry a whole lot of cargo to the moon (up to 100 tons), not to point out its $2.9 billion bid for the contract, which was far decrease than its rivals’. 

“This revolutionary human touchdown system can be an indicator in spaceflight historical past,” says Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s program supervisor for the lunar lander system. “We’re assured in NASA’s partnership with SpaceX.”

What this implies: For SpaceX’s rivals, it’s a devastating blow—particularly to Blue Origin. The corporate, based by Jeff Bezos, had unveiled its Blue Moon lander idea in 2019 and has publicly campaigned for NASA to choose it for future lunar missions. Blue Moon was arguably the most well-developed of the three proposals when NASA awarded its first spherical of contracts.

For SpaceX, it’s a giant vote of confidence in Starship as a vital piece of know-how for the subsequent era of house exploration. It comes lower than a yr after the firm’s Crew Dragon car was licensed as the solely American spacecraft able to taking NASA astronauts to house. And it appears to affirm that the SpaceX is now NASA’s greatest non-public companion, supplanting veteran corporations like Northrop Grumman and shunting newer ones like Blue Origin additional to the sidelines. Nonetheless, there’s not less than one main hurdle: Starship wants to launch utilizing a Tremendous Heavy rocket—a design that SpaceX has but to fly.

For NASA, the greatest implication is that SpaceX’s automobiles will solely proceed to play a much bigger function for Artemis, the lunar exploration program being touted as the successor to Apollo. Former president Donald Trump’s directive for NASA to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 was by no means really going to be realized, however the number of a single human lander idea suggests NASA could not miss that deadline by a lot. The primary Artemis missions will use Orion, and the long-delayed Area Launch System rocket is anticipated to be prepared quickly.