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Blue Origin, a space development company owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has filed a complaint with NASA over its rejection of a candidate for commissioning a lunar lander to be used in the Artemis program, a lunar mission.
The Artemis program is the first manned moon landing by the United States in 50 years after the Apollo program that took place between 1961 and 1972. For the Artemis plan, NASA selected a company responsible for the design and development of the manned lunar landing system HLS in May 2021. As a result, Blue Origin, led by Bezos, SpaceX, led by Tesla Elon Musk, and Dynetics, which is involved in the development of the ultra-small satellite FASTSAT, were nominated. In the end, NASA announced that it would invest only in SpaceX due to financial relations in July 2021, and Blue Origin and Dynetics, which were excluded, protested to the US Accounting Office, saying that they were not given a competitive opportunity.
In addition to the protests, Blue Origin also said it would pay $2 billion for it. On July 30, 2021, the Board of Audit and Inspection dismissed the Blue Origin and Dynamics complaints, but on August 13, Blue Origin filed a complaint against NASA in the Federal Claims Court.
According to Blue Origin, the complaint filed in the Federal Claims Court is a challenge to NASA’s illegal and erroneous evaluation of the proposal. In addition, the submitted documents are confidential because the complaint itself requested protection of company confidential information and information on selecting suppliers of confidential information.
Blue Origin said that it had filed a lawsuit to correct the inequity in the NASA HLS selection process, and believes that resolving the problems shown by the selection process and results is an unavoidable task to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure the successful lunar landing of the United States again. there is.
In response, NASA said it was in the process of reviewing the details of the lawsuit and said it will continue to provide up-to-date information on how the lawsuit will affect the Artemis program in order to achieve a lunar re-landing as safely and as early as possible under the Artemis plan. . Related information can be found here.
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