Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin takes NASA to federal court over HLS contract

Jeff Bezos’ area firm Blue Origin filed a grievance in federal courtroom in opposition to NASA, persevering with its protest that the company wrongly awarded a profitable contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX earlier this yr.

“This bid protest challenges NASA’s illegal and improper analysis of proposals,” Blue Origin’s attorneys wrote in its courtroom submitting.

The protest, filed within the U.S. Courtroom of Federal Claims on Monday, is sealed and marks the following step within the firm’s try and get NASA’s resolution overturned. A Blue Origin spokesperson confirmed the lawsuit submitting, including in a press release to CNBC that it’s wanting “to treatment the issues within the acquisition course of present in NASA’s Human Touchdown System.”

“We firmly consider that the problems recognized on this procurement and its outcomes have to be addressed to revive equity, create competitors, and guarantee a protected return to the Moon for America,” Blue Origin stated.

Blue Origin’s submitting in courtroom comes a few weeks after the U.S. Authorities Accountability Workplace denied the corporate’s protest, upholding NASA’s resolution.

The GAO ruling backed the area company’s shock announcement in April that NASA awarded SpaceX with a lunar lander contract value about $2.9 billion. SpaceX was competing with Blue Origin and Dynetics for what was anticipated to be two contracts, earlier than NASA solely awarded a single contract as a result of a lower-than-expected allocation for this system from Congress.

Blue Origin has not let up on its battle to win a contract beneath NASA’s HLS program, one of many ultimate key items of the company’s plan to return U.S. astronauts to the floor of the moon. Earlier than the April contract award, NASA had handed out practically $1 billion in idea improvement contracts – with SpaceX receiving $135 million, Dynetics $253 million, and Blue Origin receiving $579 million.

The corporate’s courtroom submitting on Monday comes as Blue Origin has stepped up a public relations offensive in opposition to NASA utilizing SpaceX’s next-generation Starship to land astronauts on the moon. In a sequence of comparative infographics, Blue Origin has emphasised the “unprecedented variety of applied sciences, developments, and operations which have by no means been completed earlier than for Starship to land on the Moon.”

Blue Origin final week launched an infographic that added that Starship is “a launch automobile that has by no means flown to orbit and continues to be being designed.”

Musk, in response to Blue Origin’s infographic, gave his view of Bezos’ firm and its criticism.

“The unhappy factor is that even when Santa Claus all of the sudden made their {hardware} actual at no cost, the very first thing you’d need to do is cancel it,” Musk wrote in a tweet.