Re: Boeing Boeing Gone!
The other bidder is Blue Origin+Lockheed-Martin+Northrop Grumman. There were three proposals: Dynetics, Blue Origin and SpaceX.
The Dynetics lander has some excellent solutions to some problems but some other problems still needed a solution when the proposal was submitted. The original concept assumed a stop at LOP-G. The 2024 deadline meant LOP-G would not be there and that caused changes to the mission profile that made the lander's payload mass margin negative.
Blue Origin should have read the instructions more carefully. They assumed NASA would make two awards so they could safely pad their proposal until the price just beat third place. The actual request for proposals document said up to 2 - which includes the possibility of 0. NASA's budget is a matter of public record so it was clear that $6B was never going to be selected even on its own. Blue were supposed to offer their best price. As Jeff could knock $2B off shortly after the submission date perhaps the $6B price was not entirely accurate. Even $4B was too expensive. The good news is that Blue's lander should get 4500kg to the Moon (6500kg with New Glenn) and Lockheed Martin's ascent vehicle should get the astronauts and a few souvenirs back to Northrop Grumman's transfer element. (There is little point in lifting tons of Moon rocks because they will not fit in the Orion Capsule for the journey back to Earth.) The bad news is the Astronauts have to spend a significant amount of time on the Moon reconfiguring the vehicle for the return journey.
As well as being half the price, the SpaceX solution gets over 100,000kg to the Moon (more if you are not bringing tons of rock back). It will be completely re-usable. On top of that, add a crew starship for the journey from Earth to Lunar Orbit and back and you can cancel a $4B SLS+Orion launch for each trip.
The most obvious Boeing involvements are that they are the lead contractor for SLS (which is required to get the Orion capsule near the Moon) and they own half of ULA who would probably provided launches for the Transfer, Landing and Ascent elements of Blue's system. (No-one was able to propose New Glenn in 2024 with straight face.)
The gigantic super-mammoth on the room is where the budget for this second lander is going to come from. One obvious place is the money already promised to SpaceX. Congress already did something similar by moving commercial crew funds to SLS which had the added bonus of delaying commercial crew so the SLS delays would have company.