The race to access space has become a collective effort now. The leading names in the space industry are helping one another and joining hands to make their mutual objective of accessing space possible and easier. Therefore, recently, a collaboration between NASA and SpaceX was seen. NASA helped SpaceX financially with the development of a moon lander it was working on. This aid is going to facilitate the process of executing the moon spacecraft.
This lunar lander will be the first one to reach the moon, once it is completed, after the Apollo mission that occurred quite a number of years earlier. On July 30th, it was recorded that the space company, NASA, gave the funds of $300 million to SpaceX, which is owned by Elon Musk. Details of this financial funding are mentioned in accordance with official open source data.
SpaceX is the recipient of the contract of NASA’s coveted $2.9 billion Human Landing Systems (HLS). It is the first financial fund given to the company by NASA since the signing of this contract. There were objections voiced by the rival companies, Blue Origin and Dynetics on this contract award. Nevertheless, NASA supported the choice of SpaceX for its contract and the funding given.
According to the US Government Accountability Office, NASA had 345 million dollars for its “Option A contract payments”. This funding given to SpaceX means that the company now has a very little amount of budget left for the rest of this fiscal year.
It may be surprising but Blue Origin received more funding from the contract signing of April 2020 from NASA than SpaceX is receiving now. If calculated, Blue Origin has received a total of $479.7 million due to the HLS contract with NASA. On the other hand, SpaceX has only received $439.6 million out of the $2.9 billion till now. Still, SpaceX is showing more productivity than Blue Origin.