Private companies take the lead in NASA missions, sealing big gov’t space contracts

The final frontier… In February, Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lander — carrying experiments for NASA — became the first US spacecraft to land on the moon since 1972 (and the first privately built spacecraft to do so). NASA paid the company $118M for the lift. The agency has big plans including a trip around the moon, a probe of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and a crewed lunar landing set for fall 2026. NASA is increasingly relying on partnerships with private companies to complete its missions, believing that US gov’t funding alone won’t be enough to get pricey jobs done.

NASA’s private redshirts… Last year, NASA paid out ~$15B to private contractors including Musk’s SpaceX (which earned about $2.3B from the agency), Boeing ($1.6B), Northrop Grumman ($1.3B), and Lockheed Martin ($1.2B). Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin received about $440M from the agency, though it also locked down a $3.4B NASA contract to build a spacecraft that will fly astronauts to and from the moon under the Artemis program. SpaceX, which won an $840M+ contract last month to decommission the ISS, received a similar moon landing contract in 2021. That’ll give the US more options for lunar-surface exploration.

Exploring the cosmos… ain’t cheap. Earlier this month, Congress proposed a NASA budget roughly $200M below the amount requested by the White House. But on the bright side for NASA and its private partners, the Artemis program (that’ll return astronauts to the moon) will still get its requested $7.6B.