NASA is moving ahead with plans to bring competition into the development of landers for its Artemis Moon program. This week, the space agency said it had selected five US companies to conduct additional work toward refining lunar lander concepts to take astronauts down to the Moon’s surface later this decade.

The combined value of the fixed-price awards is $146 million, and the work is to be completed during the next 15 months. The winning companies are:

• Blue Origin Federation of Kent, Washington, $25.6 million
• Dynetics of Huntsville, Alabama, $40.8 million
• Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado, $35.2 million
• Northrop Grumman of Dulles, Virginia, $34.8 million
• SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, $9.4 million

According to NASA, each of these companies will further develop lander design concepts and evaluate the landers’ performance, design, mission assurance requirements, and more. The companies will also mitigate lunar lander risks by conducting critical component tests and advancing the maturity of key technologies.