Enlarge / Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket on the launch pad for testing earlier this year. (credit: Blue Origin)

After years of lobbying, protests, and bidding, Jeff Bezos's space company is now a military launch contractor.

The US Space Force announced Thursday that Blue Origin will compete with United Launch Alliance and SpaceX for at least 30 military launch contracts over the next five years. These launch contracts have a combined value of up to $5.6 billion.

This is the first of two major contract decisions the Space Force will make this year as the military seeks to foster more competition among its roster of launch providers and reduce its reliance on just one or two companies.

Enlarge / In this pool photo distributed by Sputnik agency, Russia's President Vladimir Putin and North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un visit the Vostochny Cosmodrome in Amur region in 2023. An RD-191 engine is visible in the background. (credit: Vladimir Smirnov/Pool/AFP/Getty Images)

Russian President Vladimir Putin will reportedly visit North Korea later this month, and you can bet collaboration on missiles and space programs will be on the agenda.

The bilateral summit in Pyongyang will follow a mysterious North Korean rocket launch on May 27, which ended in a fireball over the Yellow Sea. The fact that this launch fell short of orbit is not unusual—two of the country's three previous satellite launch attempts failed. But North Korea's official state news agency dropped some big news in the last paragraph of its report on the May 27 launch.

The Korean Central News Agency called the launch vehicle a "new-type satellite carrier rocket" and attributed the likely cause of the failure to "the reliability of operation of the newly developed liquid oxygen + petroleum engine" on the first stage booster. A small North Korean military spy satellite was destroyed. The fiery demise of the North Korean rocket was captured in a video recorded by the Japanese news broadcaster NHK.

Enlarge / Boeing's Starliner capsule lifts off aboard United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket. (credit: United Launch Alliance)

After years of delays, Boeing's Starliner spacecraft finally rocketed into orbit from Florida on Wednesday, sending two veteran NASA astronauts on a long-delayed shakedown cruise to the International Space Station.

The Starliner capsule lifted off at 10:52 am EDT (14:52 UTC) on top of a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Fifteen minutes later, after shedding two strap-on boosters and a core stage powered by a Russian RD-180 engine, the Atlas V's Centaur upper stage released Starliner right on target to begin a nearly 26-hour pursuit of the space station. Docking at the space station is set for 12:15 pm EDT (16:15 UTC) Thursday, where NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will spend at least a week before coming back to Earth.

In remarks shortly after Wednesday's launch, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said Wilmore and Williams, both former US Navy pilots, will "test this thing from izzard to gizzard" to ensure Boeing's Starliner is ready for operational six-month crew rotation missions to the ISS.