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.

Thanks to protests by two commercial space companies, NASA’s plans for sending American astronauts back to the moon by 2024 have been put on hold — at least temporarily. 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 (GAO) against NASA, with Bezos’s company accusing the space agency of having “moved the goalposts at the last minute”.