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By Arghyadeep Dutta, 3:15 pm ET:
Jeff Bezos’s spaceflight company Blue Origin sued the U.S government in federal court against NASA’s decision to award a $2.94 billion lunar lander contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
Blue Origin said its lawsuit is “an attempt to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA’s Human Landing System.”
It also mentioned that it believes that “the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the Moon for America.”
Last month, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said the Government Accountability Office (GAO) upheld the agency’s selection of SpaceX and denied the protest filed by Blue Origin against the decision of picking up a single lunar lander provider.
“The announcement reserved the right to make multiple awards, a single award, or no award at all. In reaching its award decision, NASA concluded that it only had sufficient funding for one contract award,” GAO replied to the protest.
NASA has to file a response to Blue Origin’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims by October 12.
Earlier, Blue Origin, the company founded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com Inc, said that it remained convinced that there were “fundamental issues” with NASA’s decision and that GAO was not able to address them “due to their limited jurisdiction.”
It said it will continue to advocate for two providers as it believes that to be the right solution.
NASA, which awarded the contract to Tesla Inc’s CEO Elon Musk’s company SpaceX, had sought proposals for Human Landing System (HLS) to the lunar surface under its Artemis program.
In April, the U.S. space agency awarded SpaceX a contract to build a spacecraft as early as 2024, to send humans to the moon for the first time since 1972.
The company said NASA gave SpaceX an unfair advantage by letting it revise its pricing.
“Blue Origin will bridge the HLS budgetary funding shortfall by waiving all payments in the current and next two government fiscal years up to $2 billion to get the program back on track right now,” Bezos wrote to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson in an open letter, for the reconsideration of the contract.
Blue Origin last week released an infographic that added that Starship is “a launch vehicle that has never flown to orbit and is still being designed.”
In a response to the infographic, Musk tweeted, “The sad thing is that even if Santa Claus suddenly made their hardware real for free, the first thing you’d want to do is cancel it.
Picture Credit: The Verge