The group, which has revenues of some $100 billion, has launched contracts on, among other things, the future prices of raw materials used in its chemicals division and the likelihood of bank nationalisations.
Earlier this year, the government withheld $1 billion in rocket launching contracts from Boeing because it acquired a competitor's proprietary information.
When the United States Air Force ruled last week that employees of the Boeing Company had used internal Lockheed documents to give Boeing an unfair edge in bidding for rocket launching contracts in the mid-1990's, it compensated Lockheed by taking seven of those contracts -- worth a total of about $1 billion -- away from Boeing and handing them to Lockheed.
But SpaceIL's launch contract changes that, and places pressure on the other teams, who must now present their own launch contracts by the end of 2016 in order to remain in the race.
An Israeli company, SpaceIL, has submitted a signed launch contract with Elon Musk's SpaceX to the competition's organisers.
Moon Express signed its own launch contract on 30 September with a New Zealand start-up company called Rocket Lab, but has yet to submit the contract to the X-Prize organisers for verification.
The suspension was imposed after the Air Force found that Boeing had violated federal law by stealing more than 25,000 documents from the Lockheed Martin Corporation as the two companies competed for a rocket launch contract in 1998.
ULA did not compete for the GPS launch contract, citing accounting issues, implications of trade sanctions limiting imports of its rockets' Russian-made engines and, according to a former ULA vice-president, SpaceX's cut-rate pricing.
SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, a tech entrepreneur, is taking America's air force to court to reopen bidding for a satellite-launch contract awarded to Boeing and Lockheed.If it is hard for military suppliers to make it on civvy street, it is not much easier for them to hawk their gear to new export customers.
One of the next big steps for Astrobotic will be to secure a verified launch contract.
