Science fiction

Last Friday, NASA made an announcement that surprised a lot of people, awarding the contract to build the new lunar lander that will take astronauts back to the moon for the first time since 1972, to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

It’s not so much that SpaceX won, it’s that NASA didn’t also award a backup contract. Reading between the lines, it looks like that might have been because it just doesn’t have the budget to do so. As a result, Jeff Bezos’s company, Blue Origin, which has been around for more than 20 years and also bid on the lander, won’t be included.

I wrote about this for Inc.com early Saturday, focusing on the “full blown rivalry” between Musk and Bezos, in the words of Christian Davenport, a reporter for The Washington Post who also wrote a book called The Space Barons.

Apparently it started with a 2004 meeting between the two men that didn’t go well, and escalated when Musk outbid Bezos for NASA's Launch Pad 39A, which is where Apollo 11 and the Space Shuttle launched from. Bezos re…