Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin protests NASA HLS award to Elon Musk’s SpaceX

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin filed a protest with the Authorities Accountability Workplace in opposition to NASA on Monday, difficult the house company’s award of an almost $three billion moon lander contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX earlier this month.

SpaceX, in a contest in opposition to Blue Origin and Leidos’ subsidiary Dynetics, was awarded $2.89 billion for NASA’s Human Touchdown System program. The HLS program is concentrated on constructing a lunar lander that may carry astronauts to the moon’s floor beneath NASA’s Artemis missions. For HLS, SpaceX bid a variation of its Starship rocket, prototypes of which the corporate has been testing at its facility in Texas.

NASA was beforehand anticipated to decide on two of the three groups to competitively construct lunar landers, making the only real choice of SpaceX a shock given the company’s prior targets for this system to proceed to be a contest.

Blue Origin decried the award as “flawed” in an announcement to CNBC, saying that NASA “moved the goalposts on the final minute.”

“In NASA’s personal phrases, it has made a ‘excessive threat’ choice. Their resolution eliminates alternatives for competitors, considerably narrows the provision base, and never solely delays, but in addition endangers America’s return to the Moon. Due to that, we have filed a protest with the GAO,” Blue Origin stated.

This can be a growing story. Please verify again for updates.