TTO – Billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin lawsuit against billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX company and NASA was dismissed by a federal court in the US on 4th. -11.Blue Origin has filed a lawsuit against NASA in federal court because the agency awarded a $2.9 billion contract to send people to the Moon to SpaceX.
Both Blue Origin and SpaceX are manufacturers and operators of modern rocket and spacecraft launch services.
Blue Origin asserts that this is “an attempt to correct the flaws of the bidding process in the NASA Lunar Landing Program (HLS)”.
On November 4, Judge Richard Hertling in Federal Court dismissed Blue Origin’s lawsuit. The court also prohibited the parties from disclosing the details of the decision. However, no financial agreement has been reached, according to Russian broadcaster RT.
Billionaire Jeff Bezos seems to have admitted the lawsuit failed. “It’s not the decision we want,” he wrote on Twitter. However, he also wished “NASA and SpaceX full success in the performance of the contract”.
It is known that Blue Origin previously made a bid of $ 5.9 billion for the contract in NASA’s Moon Program. At the same time, the company proposes to cooperate with aerospace giants such as Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.After the return flight to the edge of space, billionaire Jeff Bezos also proposed to waive payments to the US Government in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 with an amount of up to $ 2 billion, in order to be determined to win back the contract that the company lost. SpaceX “takes away”. Mr. Bezos also pledged to pay for an orbital flight to test the technology.
For important projects, NASA often divides contracts among many contractors to increase competitiveness and ensure the mission is carried out on schedule.
However, in this program to send people to the Moon this time, NASA did not do so. In April 2021, NASA selected SpaceX’s $2.9 billion bid as the sole contractor, instead of Blue Origin’s $5.9 billion bid and other companies.
NASA explained that due to the budget limitation that Congress allocated for the program, they selected only one contractor and SpaceX has proven their capabilities in flights to Earth orbit.
Two weeks after this decision, Blue Origin filed an objection with the Government Accountability Office (GAO). At the end of July, this application was rejected and the GAO supported NASA’s decision.
