Last Friday, NASA awarded a $3.4 billion contract to a team led by Blue Origin for the design and construction of a second Human Landing System to fly astronauts down to the Moon.

The announcement capped a furious two-year lobbying campaign by Blue Origin owner Jeff Bezos to obtain a coveted piece of NASA's Artemis program. NASA also notched a big win, gaining the competition with SpaceX it sought for landing services. But there is a more profound takeaway from this.

After losing the initial lander contract to SpaceX two years ago, Blue Origin did not just bid a lower price this time around. Instead, it radically transformed the means by which it would put humans on the Moon. The Blue Moon lander is now completely reusable; it will remain in lunar orbit, going up and down to the surface. It will be serviced by a transport vehicle that will be fueled in low-Earth orbit and then deliver propellant to the Moon. This transporter, in turn, will be refilled by multiple launches of the reusable New Glenn rocket.

To be sure, that is a lot of hardware that has yet to be built and tested. But when we step back, there is one inescapable fact. With SpaceX's fully reusable Starship, and now Blue Moon, NASA has selected two vehicles based around the concept of many launches and the capability to store and transfer propellant in space.

This is a remarkable transformation in the way humans will explore outer space—potentially the biggest change in spaceflight since the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957. It has been a long time coming. //

The German physicist Max Planck is credited with the notion that science advances only when older practitioners die off, leaving room for new ideas. The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn more pithily summarized the sentiment by writing, "Science advances one funeral at a time."

Goff offered a variation on this idea for spaceflight: "Space policy seems to progress one congressional retirement at a time," he said.

Like Sowers, he welcomed NASA's entry into an era of reusable spaceflight. But Goff noted that it is really only happening because two billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, are aggressively pushing the idea forward.

NASA has spent so much over the last decade on the development of the SLS rocket—north of $40 billion, including ground systems—that there has been little money left over for exploration payloads to fly on them. Therefore, when it came time to fund the lunar landers, NASA had to go with the least expensive options. Both Starship and Blue Moon are, roughly, at least $10 billion development programs. But because it can purchase them with fixed-price contracts, NASA is only paying about a third of the overall cost for both, $6.3 billion.

"The only way NASA could really afford to do this was by not doing business as usual," Goff said.