Tech life
Jeff Bezos’s FINAL ATTEMPT to SHUT DOWN the SPACEX & NASA LUNAR CONTRACT
Jeff Bezos has sued NASA and the reason behind this is SpaceX winning the three billion US dollar contract for the human landing systems on the moon. The purpose of this is to find such discrepancies and preferential treatment by NASA which will in turn land the deal with Blue Origin. This is not the first time Bezos has been salty over Elon Musk’s success but it may be one of the most desperate attempts to overthrow SpaceX’s total dominance in the space race. Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic may have made the news by completing suborbital flights with their CEOs on board but it is Musk’s company that got to win NASA’s contract without any publicity stunt like the other two. Will Jeff Bezos finally be able to find some actual dirt on those he has accused and win? Or will this effort also go in vain like all those previously done by him?
The video today will first give a quick recap of the event that started it all, the contract being won by SpaceX from NASA. Then we will go over all that has been done by Jeff Bezos as a reaction to this, up to the point of filing a lawsuit. After that, we will discuss the details of the lawsuit and then finish off by sharing our take on who’s right in this case. Here’s a quick reminder that you can subscribe for free and like the video so that we can boost the algorithm. Comments are most welcomed and the best ones will get featured in one of our upcoming videos
In early 2021, it was announced by NASA that a 2.9 billion Us dollar contract has been awarded to SpaceX. The purpose of this was to commission the space exploration company to develop a modified version of its Starship rocket, known as the Starship HLS. It is an abbreviation for Human Landing System. A very optimistic time frame was set, according to which there will be a solid foothold on the lunar surface before the year 2024.
SpaceX’s spacecraft would act as a taxi from the orbital base to the surface base and vice versa. Work has been started on the Starship HLS as payments of up to 300 million US dollars have been made to Elon Musk’s company. NASA initially announced that two space exploration companies will be getting this contract but then decided to award only one at the end. This was a huge blow to all other competition which was hopeful of getting a share of this huge deal. The two main companies affected by this were Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and Dianetics.
Jeff Bezos’ initial struggles
The seriousness of the billionaire space race was quite evident when Jeff Bezos was seen struggling as hard as he could to win the moon landing contract away from SpaceX. Let us have a look at the series of events that led to the lawsuit and all which was done by Jeff Bezos up to this point. The first step of retaliation taken by him was to publicly protest the decision and go to government authorities. Blue Origin’s stance was that SpaceX was given preferential treatment from the start and changing the two company contract criteria at the last moment was a part of it.
Even though it was believed that no outcomes would come from this ranting, there were substantial ones produced. The Government Accountability Office or GAO took notice of the matter and suspended all progress on the project until it could investigate the dispute. It was a major speed bump for SpaceX as it meant that it would not be getting the payments to work on the Starship HLS. Musk decided to lay low as a response and not go towards letting loose his legal team.
Bezos’ furthered his public protest and tried another antic. He made NASA and the US government a very lucrative offer that could have resulted in him getting the space contract. He took a page out of his Amazon users manual and said that in case there are discrepancies found by the GAO and the contract to SpaceX is nullified, Bezos’ will give a discount of almost 2 billion US dollars on the contract if it were given to Blue Origin.
It was an evident attempt out of desperation to knock SpaceX out but Bezos’ said that he was doing all these discounts due to him understanding the importance of the space exploration missions. He also said that he was honored to be in a financial position to play this part. All NASA had to do to avail all this was to make Blue Origin a part of the contract.
The latest form of struggle by Jeff Bezos to take the moon lander contract away from SpaceX is to sue NASA itself. This federal lawsuit is the next step taken by Blue Origin after publicly ranting and sweetening the honeypot did not seem to have any effect. According to details of the case, the lawsuit challenges the improper and unlawful proposal evaluations made by NASA for selecting a company for the moon landing program. All three companies filed their proposals under the HLS Option A BAA or broad agency announcement.
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