Blue Origin, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, believes that NASA has misjudged the value of the bidding package that the company provides for the project to send people to the Moon.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin aerospace company has just filed a lawsuit against the US space agency NASA, an escalating protest action over NASA awarding a contract to send people to the Moon to the billionaire's rival SpaceX. billionaire Elon Musk.
A few weeks ago, upon returning from a trip to the edge of the Earth, billionaire Jeff Bezos sent an open letter to Bill Nelson, a member of the NASA board, offering to waive payments of up to 2 billion in the current and next fiscal year in exchange for a contract to build NASA's Moon lander. In addition, Mr. Bezos said, Blue Origin is ready to fund a mission of its own to low Earth orbit.
All of these actions are aimed at preventing its rival SpaceX from monopolizing NASA's contract to build a spacecraft to send people to the Moon. For important projects, NASA often awards contracts to multiple contractors to increase competitiveness and ensure missions are delivered on time, even when one company falls short of schedule.
But in this program to send people to the Moon this time, NASA did not do so. In April, NASA selected SpaceX's $2.9 billion bid as the sole contractor, instead of Blue Origin's $5.9 billion bid and another company. According to NASA's explanation, the limited budget that Congress grants to the program is the reason it chose only one contractor.
About two weeks after the decision was announced, Blue Origin filed an objection with the Government Accountability Office (GAO), but at the end of July this application was rejected and the GAO supported NASA's decision. . Now, Blue Origin's objection has been brought to the US Federal Court alleging that NASA misjudged the value of the company's bid for the program to send humans to the Moon.
This is not the first time a company related to Mr. Jeff Bezos has done so. In 2019, Amazon also sued the US Department of Defense's decision to award a $10 billion JEDI cloud infrastructure contract to rival Microsoft. After a legal battle that lasted nearly two years, the Pentagon finally canceled the project and replaced it with a new project with the participation of both Amazon and Microsoft.