Blue Origin Loses Legal Fight Over SpaceX’s NASA Moon Contract

But that was widely viewed as unrealistic even before Blue Origin’s legal challenges, which forced NASA to pause work with SpaceX while the litigation played out for six months.

In an initial Blue Origin protest with the Government Accountability Office filed in April, the company argued that NASA should have canceled or changed the rules of the program when it realized it couldn’t afford two lander systems (another company, Dynetics, filed a similar complaint). Rejecting that argument, the office ruled NASA had fairly evaluated the proposals. Although it agreed that NASA had improperly waived one requirement for SpaceX, that mistake was not serious enough to merit redoing the competition.

Blue Origin’s subsequent complaint in court focused largely on that NASA waiver, which let SpaceX skip certain government safety reviews to accommodate its novel plan to launch a dozen or so “tanker” rockets that would fuel up its two moon-bound Starship launches, legal filings in the G.A.O. dispute indicated. Instead of having a review for every launch, as NASA originally required, the agency allowed SpaceX to propose just three reviews in all: one for each moon-bound Starship launch, and one that encompassed all the tanker launches.

Blue Origin cited that waiver to support its claim that NASA gave SpaceX an unfair advantage.

During the litigation, Blue Origin waged a lobbying effort in Congress to pressure NASA into adding another company into the lander program. Its lobbyists sought to paint SpaceX’s Starship as risky and “extremely complex” in materials they distributed to lawmakers. SpaceX lobbyists countered, effectively casting Blue Origin as a sore loser and stating it plans to conduct reviews with NASA before each Starship launch.

But NASA resisted Blue Origin’s pressure and pointed to its goal of starting another lunar lander competition next year. What remains unknown is how much funding the agency will get for those missions from a Congress steeped in budgetary battles over President Biden’s social spending agenda.

And as competition in space between Mr. Bezos and Mr. Musk heats up and attracts more public attention, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and other progressive lawmakers have waded into space policy, opposing extra moon lander money as part of their criticism of billionaires.

“They are in the wrong camp, and they don’t know it,” Lori Garver, NASA’s former deputy administrator under President Barack Obama, said of progressives who oppose providing more funds toward NASA’s moon lander programs.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/04/science/blue-origin-nasa-spacex-moon-contract.html