Building a spacecraft is about managing various forms of risk: the risk of hardware failure, software errors, design flaws, you name it. But the project managers of Lucy, an upcoming NASA mission to distant trojan asteroids, face a new type of risk: the risk that they could miss a launch window due to legal battles between rocket companies.

On 31 January, NASA's Launch Services Program announced that it had awarded a contract to United Launch Alliance (ULA) to launch Lucy into space. The company's Atlas V-401 rocket, the same configuration that launched MAVEN to Mars, was selected for a cost of $148 million.

SpaceX, which had proposed its Falcon 9 rocket for the same purpose, filed a formal protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) 11 days later, triggering a formal review. In response, NASA issued a stop-work order to ULA while the contract is under review, which could take as long as 3 months.

SpaceX justified its protest by saying that the company "offered a solution with extraordinarily high confidence of mission success at a price dramatically lower than the award amount, so we believe the decision to pay vastly more [to ULA] for the same mission was therefore not in the best interest of the agency or the American taxpayers."

People familiar with the Lucy project emphasized that mission planning continues despite the launch vehicle uncertainty. However, the uncertainty about which rocket they will use makes it difficult to optimize the spacecraft design to maximize its performance and minimize its fuel use. According to a GAO report on major NASA projects from 2018, Lucy has passed its preliminary design review and its team is working to finalize its design specifications ahead of entering the most complicated (and expensive) phase of the mission: the period where the hardware is built, integrated, and tested. Knowing the launch vehicle is an important part of mission planning at this stage.