- Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are racing to put humans back on the moon for the first time in 50 years.
- New NASA boss Jared Isaacman said the agency will pick whichever company finishes its lunar lander first.
- Acting NASA head Sean Duffy reopened SpaceX’s contract in October, saying Musk’s company was “behind schedule.”
NASA’s new boss has reiterated the stakes for the lunar race between Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.
On his first day in the job, Jared Isaacman said the space agency would pick whichever company finished its moon lander first, out of Musk’s SpaceX or Bezos’ Blue Origin.
“I don’t think it was lost on either vendor that whichever lander was available first to ensure that America achieves its strategic objectives on the moon is the one we were going to go with,” Isaacman told Bloomberg TV on Thursday, a day after he was confirmed as NASA administrator by the US Senate.
SpaceX and Blue Origin both hold contracts to build lunar landers for NASA to help carry astronauts to the surface of the moon.
A modified version of SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket is set to be used in 2027 for NASA’s Artemis III mission, which aims to put astronauts back to the moon for the first time in over 50 years.
In October, however, then-acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy reopened SpaceX’s lunar contract, stating that the company was “behind schedule” on its lander and suggesting that NASA could opt for Blue Origin’s spacecraft for the historic mission instead.
Isaacman flew two private missions as a SpaceX astronaut in 2021 and 2024 and took part in the first-ever commercial space walk.
The billionaire’s connection to Musk almost cost him the top job at NASA, with Donald Trump temporarily withdrawing his nomination earlier this year amid a high-profile spat between the US president and the world’s richest man.
Musk also clashed with Isaacman’s predecessor, Duffy, over the decision to reopen the moon contracts, calling the transport secretary a “dummy” and claiming that SpaceX would end up “doing the whole moon mission” by itself.
It comes after Trump signed a new executive order on Thursday that called on the US to establish a permanent outpost and nuclear reactors on the moon by 2030.
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