nasa contract

Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is part of a payload contract NASA has awarded for as much as $100 million over a decade. Elon Musk's rocket launch and satellite operator will share the contract for unspecified “commercial payload processing services” with Astrotech Space Operations LLC, a unit of Lockheed Martin Corp., the government's space agency announced Friday in a statement. The deal is for payload processing, which involves preparing spacecraft to be flown on top of a rocket ahead of a flight to space.…

The battle for domination of space by private firms is not new. The latest competition saw Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos tussle in the race to make commercial space tourism a reality. Now, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has taken a swipe at Bezos' Blue Origin for hiring a high-profile strategic advisory firm after it lost a $2.9 billion (roughly Rs. 21,540 crores) NASA lunar lander contract to SpaceX. Without naming Bezos, Musk said the billionaire should “consider spending some money” on actual lunar lander hardware, instead of…