Bezos bid to reverse moon ruling rejected
Jeff Bezos’ rocket company carried him to the edge of space. But it won’t be flying NASA astronauts to the moon’s surface, at least for now.
The Government Accountability Office on Friday rejected protests challenging NASA’s decision to go with just one spacecraft lander design for its return of astronauts to the moon, a $2.9 billion award that went to Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX.
The competition for the contracts was seen as a battle of billionaires between Musk and Bezos, founder of Amazon who also started a rocket company, Blue Origin. A third company, Dynetics, a defense contractor in Huntsville, Ala., was also competing for the contract.
When the competition was announced, NASA officials said they wanted more than one design to ensure both competition and redundancy in case one of the companies stumbled.
But in April, NASA announced that it was awarding just one contract, to SpaceX. The Hawthorne (Los Angeles County) company will use the money for the development of Starship, the large reusable spacecraft that it is developing in South Texas and that is central to Musk’s ambitions of one day sending people to Mars.
NASA officials suggested then that they were hemmed in by limited budgets. Congress had provided $850 million in the current fiscal year for the project, onefourth of what the Trump administration had asked for in its final budget request.
Blue Origin and Dynetics protested the award to the Government Accountability Office, which can review federal contract decisions. The GAO said NASA did not violate any of its rules by making just one award — the announcement of the competition said NASA reserved the right to make just one award — or none at all.
The GAO also said NASA had fairly evaluated the three proposals, and although it agreed that NASA had improperly waived one requirement for SpaceX, that mistake was not serious enough to merit redoing the competition.
“Despite this finding, the decision also concludes that the protesters could not establish any reasonable possibility of competitive prejudice arising from this limited discrepancy in the evaluation,” the GAO said in a statement.
The award to SpaceX is just for the first moon landing, scheduled for 2024, although few expect it will occur that soon. “Importantly, the GAO’s decision will allow NASA and SpaceX to establish a timeline for the first crewed landing on the moon in more than 50 years,” NASA said in a statement.
NASA officials have said they would have another moonlander competition open to Blue Origin, Dynetics and any other company.