Blue Origin, SpaceX Fight Over Moon Lander Intensifies, Bezos Sues NASA

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin has taken its dispute with NASA over the agency’s Human Landing System (HLS) contract to federal court after losing a case in the US Government Accountability Office.

Blue Origin was one of three private companies competing for a contract with NASA to build a human landing vehicle on the moon. In April, NASA awarded a $ 2.9 billion contract to SpaceX and selected the company led by Elon Musk as the sole partner in the HLS project. Blue Origin’s proposal, estimated at $ 5.9 billion, along with an equally expensive offer from Dynetics, was rejected.

Blue Origin filed a lawsuit with the United States Federal Claims Court on Friday to challenge “the illegal and inappropriate assessment of proposals by NASA” submitted during the tender process, lawyers said by Blue Origin, The edge first reported.

The lawsuit came after Blue Origin and Dynetics failed to challenge NASA’s decision before the federal watchdog, the US Government Accountability Office, which ruled earlier this month that NASA had held a fair competition. .

“Blue Origin has filed a lawsuit with the United States Federal Claims Court in an attempt to remedy flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA’s human landing system,” a spokesperson for the NASA said. company in an email to Observer. “We strongly believe that the problems identified in this procurement and its results must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition and ensure a safe return to the moon for America.”

Still, it’s an ironic contrast to what Bezos said about the NASA contract bidding wars just three years ago.

Speaking at the JFK Space Summit in 2019, Bezos openly criticized protests against the bids as an obstacle slowing down NASA’s space exploration efforts. Comparing today’s contracting process with the more streamlined system of the 1960s, he said, “Today there would be three protests and the losers would sue the federal government because they didn’t. won.

A NASA spokesperson said the agency “is currently reviewing the details of the case.”

Also on Friday, Blue Origin lost a top engineer from its lunar lander team to its worst enemy. The head of architecture and integration of the company’s HLS mission, Nitin Arora, announced on his LinkedIn page on Monday that he had left Blue Origin to join SpaceX. His last day was Friday.

Arora was a former engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). He joined Blue Origin in 2018 to work on the company’s “Blue Moon” lunar lander. “It was a hell of a trick working on the lunar program. Truly honored to have had the chance to work with and lead such incredibly smart and passionate people [the] for the past three years, ”Arora wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday.