By 
Jeff Bezos‘s space company said it is making another run at the moon, after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration chose rival SpaceX to handle a high-profile lunar mission last year.
Blue Origin LLC, the space company Bezos founded and has backed, said Tuesday in a tweet that it is part of a group that submitted a bid to develop a lunar lander capable of transporting NASA astronauts to the surface of the moon on future missions for Artemis, the agency’s space-exploration program. Blue Origin’s partners on its bid include Lockheed Martin Corp.
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Last year, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to use a version of the Elon Musk-led company’s planned Starship vehicle to handle that task, on a mission currently set for 2025.
NASA’s decision to issue a single contract for that lander drew a protest and a lawsuit from Blue Origin, both of which were unsuccessful. It also prompted Mr. Bezos to write a letter to NASA’s administrator, Bill Nelson. “Instead of investing in two competing lunar landers as originally intended, the agency chose to confer a multiyear, multibillion-dollar head start to SpaceX,” his letter from July of last year said.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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