Nasa last week quietly delayed its plan to award two high-profile crewed lunar lander contracts. The finish line back two months for a crucial program under the Trump administration’s hasty timeline to get astronauts on the moon in 2024.

Spacex and Dynetics won a combined $ 967 million in seed funding last year. It’s the space agency’s first effort to spend money on moon landers since the Apollo program in the 1970s.

Nasa announced last Wednesday that an extension to their development contracts’will be required’. The agency had planned to pick two of the three bidders in late February. Nasa picked a new award date of April 30th.

The spending bill Congress passed in December gives NASA $ 850 million for the human landing system program. But NASA remained committed to the February award date and the 2024 moonshot. A delay was also expected as Biden’s team holds off on releasing any space policy.

Delay is designed to give it more time to evaluate the bidders’ proposals. Nasa said it may not need the full extension period and could award the lander contracts earlier.

Spacex has been launching and landing in short, suborbital test flights. The company’s chunk of development funds was $ 135 million.

Blue Origin got the largest award, $ 579 million, to develop its blue moon lander. The company announced a’national team’ in 2019 comprised of Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper to work on the project.

The administration has yet to pick its NASA administrator or release any space policy goals, but is expected to slow down the mission’s run to the moon by 2024. This month, the administration announced its team for the White House’s office of science and technology policy, picking pioneering geneticist Eric lander as Biden’s top science adviser.