After a trip to space, Blue Origin's founding father Jeff Bezos is offering to slash the cost of building a lunar lander by up to $2 billion and self-fund a pathfinder mission, in exchange for a NASA contract.

This contract is for the development of a lunar lander for the Human Landing System program which aims to return humans from the moon for the first time the Apollo days.

The billionaire business tycoon is said that the company would forgo up to $2 billion in payments in the first years of a new award, as well as pay for a demonstration mission. This pertains to if NASA were to give the company an HLS award like the one SpaceX received in April to develop and demonstrate a crewed lunar lander.

However, a year later, NASA announced that it had chosen only one company for the contract, that is, SpaceX, in a departure from past procedure. Since Elon Musk's company, SpaceX, submitted a $2.89 billion plan for their lander, which is less than half of Blue Origin's $5.99 billion budget.

Bezos argued that NASA did not give a chance to revise Blue Origin’s price unlike SpaceX during the HLS competition. Hence, Bezos is now proposing a $2 billion discount on that price.

Blue Origin is projected to also conduct a pathfinder flight to low-Earth orbit of the lunar descent element at its own expense to further remove development and schedule risks. This would be in addition to the company's baseline strategy for constructing the lunar lander system, which included an unmanned lunar landing demonstration.

It’s not today that Blue Origin has raised questions against NASA’s decision to work with one vendor alone. As a matter of fact, a week prior to the award announcement, Blue Origin together with Dynetics, filed complaints with the Government Accountability Office. Blue Origin stated that the contract rules prevented companies from competing effectively.

he billionaire business tycoon said that Blue Origin will forgo any payments up to $2 billion in the current fiscal year and the next two. According to Bezos, “this offer is an unambiguous and permanent waiver of those payments, not a deferral. This offer gives the government time to catch up on appropriation actions”.

Currently, it is said that agency officials have withdrawn from discussing matters regarding the HLS plan and the contract with SpaceX is on hold since it is being contested.