A chief engineer from Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has left to join Elon Musk’s SpaceX. He was working on Blue Origin’s lunar lander.

• A senior engineer at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin leaves to join Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
• Nitin Arora worked on Blue Origin’s moon lander.
• It comes after NASA picked SpaceX, not Blue Origin, for a major moon landing contract.
• See more stories on the Insider business page.

A chief engineer of Blue Origin’s lunar lander project leaves to join SpaceX.

It follows Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin, which lost to Elon Musk’s SpaceX on a $ 2.9 billion deal with NASA to take humans to the moon.

Nitin Arora announced in a LinkedIn post on Monday that he was leaving Blue Origin after nearly three years with the company.

Arora was working on Blue Origin’s lunar lander, which was designed to carry different payloads to the moon’s surface.

“Friday (August 13) was my last day at Blue Origin,” Arora wrote in the post. “It has been a hell of a ride working on the Lunar Program. Truly honored to have had the chance to work with and lead some incredibly smart and passionate people over the past three years… Next stop, SpaceX!”

Blue Origin offered its lunar lander for a contract with NASA to bring humans back to the moon by 2024. The agency initially announced it would pick two winners from SpaceX, Blue Origin and Dynetics – but instead, it only selected SpaceX.

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On Monday, Blue Origin sued NASA over its decision. A spokesperson for Blue Origin said in a statement to Insider that the company wanted to “address the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA’s human landing system.”

Before suing NASA, Blue Origin filed a protest in April, offered to cover up to $ 2 billion for the first two years of production of a lunar lander, and infographics on its website depicting the SpaceX’s spacecraft as “extremely complex and high-risk”. The graphics seemed to select the details, Insider’s Morgan McFall-Johnsen reported.

Elon Musk’s company is expected to use Starship to send astronauts to the moon under a contract with NASA.

It wasn’t clear from Arora’s post if he would be working on Starship. The insider asked Arora for comment, but did not immediately receive a response.