In the long arc of humanity's reach toward Mars, the question of who builds the invisible bridges — the relay networks that will carry voices and data across interplanetary distances — is not merely a business matter but a civilizational one. Rocket Lab has formally contested NASA's decision to award Blue Origin $700 million to construct Mars telecommunications infrastructure, bringing the dispute before the Government Accountability Office. The protest reflects a broader truth about this era of space exploration: as the stakes grow planetary in scale, so too does the intensity of the competit