Earlier this year, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin lost a bid to competitor SpaceX to build a human landing system for NASA's Artemis Program. This week, it won a NASA contract for a similar job—but at a much smaller price tag.

NASA announced Tuesday that it has awarded Blue Origin and four other companies a batch of contracts worth a combined $146 million to develop moon lander concepts that could potentially lead to actual landing system development in the future.

Blue Origin's contract was $26.5 million. The other four companies are SpaceX ($9.4 million), Dynetics ($40.8 million), Lockheed Martin ($35.2 million) and Northrop Grumman ($34.8 million).

The contracts were awarded under NASA's NextSTEP-2 (Next Space Technologies for Exploration Partnerships) Appendix N: Sustainable Human Landing System Studies and Risk Reduction.