Jeff Bezos offers NASA $2 billion to pick Blue Origin’s lunar lander in last-minute plea
Jeff Bezos is offering NASA a discount of at least $2 billion for the agency to give his space company a lucrative human lunar landing system contract that his rival, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, won earlier this year. Bezos’ new offer is the latest in an escalating string of efforts to win the contract for Blue Origin.
In a Monday morning letter to NASA administrator Bill Nelson, Bezos said he’d permanently waive up to $2 billion in contract payments for the first two years if NASA adds Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander to a key phase of the agency’s Human Landing System program, which calls for landing the first humans on the lunar surface in decades. On top of that, Blue Origin would self-fund a Blue Moon test launch to low-Earth orbit, a...