The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced on Friday that it has designated Ylon Mask’s SpaceX to design the spacecraft for the first astronaut flights to the moon since 1972.
The $ 2.9 billion contract aims to use a prototype of the Starship missile, which is still being tested at SpaceX in Texas.
“Today, we and we are all excited to announce that we have entrusted SpaceX with the continued development of our integrated human descent system,” said Lisa Watson-Morgan, NASA’s human descent system program manager.
SpaceX competed with Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and defense industry company Dynetics to become the sole developer of the system. NASA has abandoned its previous practice of selecting multiple companies in the event that one fails.
Industry analysts acknowledged that the decision demonstrates Mask’s 2002 SpaceX as NASA’s most trusted private sector partner.
Last year, SpaceX became the first private company to successfully deploy a crew to the International Space Station (ISS), restoring the US capability to do so for the first time since the end of the space shuttle program.
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