Blue Origin provides NASA $2 billion in last-ditch try at lunar lander contract | Engadget

After getting back from the sting of area, Jeff Bezos has personally waded into Blue Origin’s dispute with NASA over its choice to award a $2.9 billion lunar lander contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In an open letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, Bezos stated his firm is prepared to waive as much as $2 billion in funds from NASA within the present and subsequent two federal fiscal years in return for a fixed-price lander contract. Bezos stated Blue Origin can also be prepared to fund its personal pathfinder mission to low-Earth orbit. “This offer is not a deferral, but is an outright and permanent waiver of those payments,” Bezos stated within the letter. “This offer provides time for government appropriation actions to catch up.”

While Bezos spends a big a part of his letter speaking about Blue Origin’s dedication to “advance America’s future in space,” his supply is not altruistic. At the center of it’s the perception that NASA unfairly excluded his firm from a profitable and prestigious contract. When it involves its most necessary tasks, NASA has traditionally handed out agreements to a number of contractors to advertise competitors and guarantee it might probably get a mission off the bottom on time if one firm falls delayed. In its newest procurement, NASA did not try this, and Blue Origin filed a protest with the federal authorities shortly after that.

At the time, a Blue Origin spokesperson advised Engadget NASA “executed a flawed acquisition for the Human Landing System program and moved the goalposts at the last minute.” That’s one thing Bezos reiterates in his letter. “Instead of investing in two competing lunar landers as originally intended, the Agency chose to confer a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar head start to SpaceX,” the previous Amazon CEO stated. “That decision broke the mold of NASA’s successful commercial space programs by putting an end to meaningful competition for years to come.”

It’s arduous to say how NASA will reply to the open letter. The Human Landing System challenge cannot transfer ahead whereas the US Government Accountability Office evaluations the protest from Blue Origin. Notably, this is not the primary time a Bezos-affiliated firm has received itself right into a contract dispute with the US authorities. In 2019, Amazon challenged the Department of Defense’s choice to award Microsoft its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. After a virtually two-year-long authorized battle, the Pentagon canceled that challenge initially of July in favor of a brand new multi-vendor challenge that may hand out work to each Amazon and Microsoft.