The owner of Blue Origin and Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos recently enjoyed a brief detour in Titusville from his ambitious cosmic pursuits.

On Thursday, June 1st, Bezos made a quiet landing in Titusville. An Instagram account dedicated to tracking Bezos’ jets, @bezosjets, reported his aircraft had completed a 744-mile flight from Dulles International Airport in Dulles, VA to Space Coast Regional Airport in south Titusville around 3:30 p.m. As of Friday, June 2nd, Bezo’s private jet was still parked at Space Coast Regional Airport

During his stay, Bezos paid a visit to a local favorite, El Leoncito. The restaurant shared images of Bezos with employees on its Facebook page and TikTok account.

According to the posts, Bezos relished the restaurant’s “Palomilla,” a 10-ounce choice top sirloin steak, “Old Havana Style,” accompanied by white rice, plantains, and black beans.

This visit follows the recent announcement of a $3.8 billion contract awarded to Blue Origin by NASA. Blue Origin has been chosen to develop the Human Landing System, a monumental project set to return humans to the moon’s surface.

The winning team led by Blue Origin includes major space and technology firms such as Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Draper, Astrobotic, and Honeybee Robotics.

This team outperformed a group led by Leidos-owned Dynetics in the competition known as the Sustaining Lunar Development (SLD) program. The SLD was a second-chance contest initiated by NASA following the awarding of the first crew lander contract, the Human Landing System (HLS), to SpaceX, Elon Musk’s company, in 2021.

The SLD program and its predecessor, the HLS, form part of NASA’s ambitious Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the Moon and carry out sustainable lunar exploration. This ambitious agenda took a major step forward in December when NASA successfully completed the maiden, uncrewed Artemis mission using its Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft.

Blue Origin’s proposal for the SLD program was lauded for its compelling strengths, which included two pathfinder missions without crews in 2024 and 2025, early-stage technology maturity, and excess capabilities of the lander itself, all presented at a reasonable price.

The awarding of the HLS contract to SpaceX, however, led to intense protests from Blue Origin. The company took issue with the contract’s awarding process, going as far as to sue NASA in court after the Government Accountability Office rejected their initial protest.

The lawsuit saw heated exchanges between Bezos and Musk, with the former offering to cover NASA costs up to $2 billion in exchange for a lunar lander contract, while Musk quipped, “You cannot sue your way to the moon, no matter how good your lawyers are.” After much ado, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled in favor of NASA, allowing progress on the HLS contract to resume.

As Bezos continues to invest in his vision for space exploration, his presence in Titusville, near Blue Origin’s site and the iconic Kennedy Space Center, underlines the growing influence and ambitious scope of commercial space ventures and the benefits Titusville will see from those ventures

As his company prepares to develop the Human Landing System for NASA, this visit may mark one small step for Bezos, but potentially, it represents a giant leap for Blue Origin and the future of the Space Coast