Guwahati News Desk: Jeff Bezos’ protest against NASA’s SpaceX $2.9 billion contract, squashed by the US Government Accountability Office (GAO), on Friday.
Bezos-run, Blue Origin, and defence contractor, Dynetics, had filed a protest with the US GAO against NASA for awarding the $2.9 billion contract to the Elon Musk-owned SpaceX for the Moon lander programme, that is planning to land astronauts on the Moon by 2024.
NASA was expected to pick two lunar lander prototypes (including one of Blue Origin’s), but due to a funding cut from the US Congress, the US space agency decided to select SpaceX over Blue Origin.
These were the events that led Blue Origin and Dynetics to file a protest with GAO against NASA.
Meanwhile, GAO on Friday rejected Blue Origin’s protest and stated, “There was no requirement for NASA to engage in discussions, amend, or cancel the announcement as a result of the amount of funding available for the programme.”
In a tweet, Musk responded to the news by tweeting “GAO” with a flexing bicep emoji.
As per the sources, it was after Bezos’ trip to the edge of space, earlier this week, when he offered NASA a discount of up to $2 billion to give his space company Blue Origin the human lunar landing system (HLS) contract.
Further escalating his space war with Musk, Bezos in an open letter to the NASA Administrator Bill Nelson stated that his company would close US space agency’s near-term budgetary shortfall and produce a safer and more sustainable lander that will return Americans to the surface of the Moon – this time to stay.
A Blue Origin spokesperson also commented, “We stand firm in our belief that there were fundamental issues with NASA’s decision, but the GAO wasn’t able to address them due to their limited jurisdiction.”
Meanwhile, NASA informed that the GAO ruling allows the agency and SpaceX to come up with a timeline for landing humans on the Moon, and that the moon lander contract is part of NASA’s Artemis programme, which aims to return astronauts to the moon by 2024 as a stepping stone to the first human mission to Mars.
