Elon Musk trolls Jeff Bezos after SpaceX beats Blue Origin to $2.9bn NASA contract for Moon lander

As if losing out on $2.9bn dollars wasn’t enough.

Elon Musk trolled Jeff Bezos on Twitter on Monday, joking that the Amazon CEO “can’t get it up (to orbit),” after Mr Musk’s SpaceX rocket company beat out Mr Bezos’ own space venture, Blue Origin, in a contest for a $2.9 billion NASA contract to build a next-generation Moon lander.

That same day, Blue Origin lodged a 50-page protest of the decision with federal auditors at the Government Accountability Office. The company argued that NASA misjudged Blue Origin’s proposal in the three-way competition to build the new Moon lander, which also involved a bid from the Alabama-based defence firm Dynetics.

“It’s really atypical for NASA to make these kinds of errors,” Bob Smith, chief executive of Blue Origin, told The New York Times. “They’re generally quite good at acquisition, especially its flagship missions like returning America to the surface of the moon. We felt that these errors needed to be addressed and remedied.”

NASA told The Independent it could not comment on the matter “due to pending litigation.”

The three companies were competing to build the landing craft that would be used in NASA’s Artemis programme, which aims to land the first woman and next man on the surface of the Moon by 2024. It’s the first time in decades, since the famous Apollo programme of the late 1960s, that NASA has directly funded human landing craft for other planets.

“NASA is returning to the Moon for scientific discovery, economic benefits, and inspiration for a new generation,” the space agency said in a statement last year, announcing the final competition for building the lander. “On the surface, the agency has proposed building a new habitat and rovers, testing new power systems and much more to get ready for human exploration of Mars.”

Both Mr Bezos and Mr Musk have argued that given the precarious state of Earth’s climate and natural resources, the future of the human race lies in colonising space.

“I think there are really two fundamental paths,” Mr Musk once said. “History is going to bifurcate along two directions. One path is we stay on Earth forever, and then there will be some eventual extinction event. I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually, history suggests, there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilisation and a multiplanetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go.”

The Amazon CEO made a similar argument at a 2019 Blue Origin event.

“We will run out of energy,” Mr Bezos said. “This is just arithmetic. It’s going to happen.”

Both men’s space plans have been criticised for their perceived elitism, and for directing massive amounts of resources to space travel that could be put to funding other efforts on Earth.