After focusing on delivering packages to the door for most of his career, Jeff Bezos turned his attention to sending humans to the moon. On Monday, his commercial space adventure showed its ambitions for the moon. attach great importance to.
Bezos’s Blue Origin is about NASA’s decision to award Elon Musk’s SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build the first lunar lander to send astronauts to the moon since the Apollo era. File a lawsuit.
The decision was previously the subject of Blue Origin protests, but was rejected by the Government Accountability Office on July 30. Blue Origin’s bid protest was filed in the U.S. Federal Claims Court on Monday morning, escalating the problem and trying to find more in the court system with good results.
In addition to the monetary value of the contract, the reputation of cooperating with NASA will also be a historic milestone for its Artemis lunar exploration program. The goal is to return astronauts to the moon as soon as 2024.
At the same time, the situation has turned into a space quarrel.Blue Origin Infographic Previously criticized SpaceX’s plan As “extremely complex and high-risk.”
Speaking of Blue Origin, Musk responded on Twitter: “Sadly, even if Santa suddenly makes their hardware a reality for free, the first thing you want to do is cancel it.”
Sadly, even if Santa suddenly makes their hardware a reality for free, the first thing you have to do is cancel it
-Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 13, 2021
When bidding for the contract, Blue Origin and its industry partners-Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper-proposed an enhanced version of the Apollo lunar lander with descending elements, Rising element and transfer element. Another company, Dynetics, proposed a low-suspension integrated design that can land on the water and take off again.
SpaceX plans to manufacture a customized version of its Starship super rocket.
The Blue Origin team’s proposal was priced at close to $6 billion, twice the price of SpaceX’s bid. Dynetics’ bid is around US$9 billion.
In court on Monday morning, Blue Origin requested permission to file the lawsuit in a sealed manner, so the exact nature of its claim is unclear. However, In an accompanying motionBlue Origin stated that the bid protest “challenged NASA’s illegal and improper evaluation of the proposal” and referred to the decision to award a single contract, which was one of the issues cited in its GAO protest.
NASA initially hoped to fund two of the three teams to continue research on their manned landing system, which would provide a backup option. Agency officials cited congressional budget constraints as one of the reasons why only one award was awarded. Blue Origin and Dynetics argued to GAO that a single award would promote competition and technological redundancy, but they were unsuccessful.
As part of the initial evaluation, NASA rated SpaceX’s proposal as the highest technically.
Including GeekWire contributing editor Alan Boyle (Alan Boyle)’s previous report.