NASA has accepted a ten-week expectation on its Lunar Spacex contract to cope with the recent pursuit brought by the loss offering Blue Origin, everything but to ensure that NASA will miss its 2024 goal for return humanity at the moon.
“NASA has voluntarily paused working with SpaceX for the Human Landing System (HLS) option from August 19th to November 1st,” according to a communiqué sent by NASA e-mail to Gizmodo.
Blue Origin, led by the founder of Amazon Jeff Bezos, filed a complaint last week in a federal court demanding that the price of the NASA contract for Spacex be canceled and that a new tender process have place.
The original blue suit is under a protection prescription, so that the details of the combination are not specifically known, but Blue Origin, and Bezos in particular, are not silent on their objections.
In a protest presented at the Government’s Office earlier this year, Blue Origina argued that the original NASA contract offer indicated that several lanes would be constructed, but in the end only one has been selected, Starship Spacex.
Bezos even offered to pay for $ 2 billion of its $ 5.9 billion of origin offers in order to win NASA, but NASA says that, because of the budgetary constraints imposed by the Congress, they had funding for a proposal of the lander.
The Gao rejected Blue origin argument on July 30, giving Nasa the green light to start working with Spacex on the human launch system (HLS) that landed astronauts on the moon for the first time since 1972.
Now that the work has been put on hold while NASA tries this last trial of Blue Origin. “In exchange for this temporary work stay, all parties have agreed on an accelerated litigation schedule that ends on November 1,” said NASA. “NASA officials continue to work with the Department of Justice to review the details of the case and we look forward to a rapid resolution of this issue. »
Analysis: more than me a billionaire of the wounded
Also tempting that it can be for some to cancel the demonstration of Blue origin like whining of a particularly bitter billionaire, the Blue Origin proposal was not made by Blue Origin alone.
Due to the experience, Limited Blue Origin in real spatial flight – Jeff Bezos long journey after the Karman line despite – the company has entered into a partnership with heavyweights in the aerospace industry: Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.
As founding members of the Militaro-Industrial Complex, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin have long benefited from a regular flow of government contracts with little or no real competition.
With little incentive to offer the lowest possible submission to obtain a contract, many of these companies have obtained very used for the government simply having no choice but to accept the only offers qualified on the table – which Just happen to be big.
Spacex disrupted by offering extremely competitive offers and always offer results. It should be noted that even with Bezo’s offer to cover $ 2 billion in its own company’s own candidacy, the Blue Origin offer was still $ 1 billion more than spacex $ 2.9 billion.
Although there is no doubt Jeff Bezos would like to see a lunar lander with crew of his company being the first to land on the moon in more than 50 years, the real engines of this legal action are more likely Northrup Grumman And Lockheed Martin, who saw their NASA contract sales begin to slip.
