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SpaceX Awarded Shared NASA Contract Worth Up to $100 Million

The SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket carrying the Crew5 Dragon spacecraft lifts off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Oct. 5, 2022.

Photographer: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
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Space Exploration Technologies Corp. is part of a payload contract NASA has awarded for as much as $100 million over a decade.

Elon Musk’s rocket launch and satellite operator will share the contract for unspecified “commercial payload processing services” with Astrotech Space Operations LLC, a unit of Lockheed Martin Corp., the government’s space agency announced Friday in a statement. The deal is for payload processing, which involves preparing spacecraft to be flown on top of a rocket ahead of a flight to space.