The billionaire’s space company, Blue Origin, won a key contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Friday to develop a crewed lunar lander for delivering astronauts to the moon’s surface later this decade under the agency’s Artemis program. The effort is effectively a more than $7 billion project.

The contract award caps a long, occasionally contentious struggle by Blue Origin to join the Artemis program. The company and another team lost out to SpaceX in 2021 when NASA awarded Elon Musk's company a $2.9 billion contract to build a variant of its Starship rocket for the initial Artemis 3 moon landing.

What Happened: Blue Origin has been chosen by NASA to construct a spacecraft tasked with ferrying astronauts to and from the moon’s surface. As part of the agency’s lunar exploration initiative, known as the Artemis program, Blue Origin will be responsible for the lunar lander’s design, testing and development.

Elon Musk has some thoughts about Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin suing NASA last month over the space agency's lunar lander contract with Musk's SpaceX. "He should put more of his energy into getting into orbit than lawsuits," Musk, CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, said during an interview Tuesday with Kara Swisher at the Code conference in Los Angeles.