Future Timeline

Mon 16 Aug 2021

Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin has sued the US government over Nasa’s decision to award a $2.9bn lunar lander contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
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Bezos, the founder of Amazon and one of the world’s richest people, founded Blue Origin to pursue the dream of commercial space flight, which saw him, his brother and two other crew members blast off from Texas last month.

After that flight, Blue Origin offered Nasa $2bn if it would change its mind on the lunar lander contract. It did not, and the Blue Origin lawsuit was filed in the US court of federal claims on Friday.

In a court filing, the company said it was challenging “Nasa’s unlawful and improper evaluation of proposals”.

Last month, the federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) sided with Nasa over its decision to pick a single lunar lander provider, rejecting Blue Origin’s protest.

(TechCrunch) Blue Origin, the space company helmed by billionaire Jeff Bezos, is taking NASA to court. The company filed a complaint with a federal claims court on Monday over the agency’s decision to award a lunar lander contract solely to rival company SpaceX.

The complaint, which Blue Origin successfully petitioned to have sealed, says NASA’s evaluation of proposals for the the Human Landing System was “unlawful and improper.”

“Blue Origin filed suit in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims in an attempt to remedy the flaws in the acquisition process found in NASA’s Human Landing System,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. “We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and its outcomes must be addressed to restore fairness, create competition, and ensure a safe return to the moon for America.”

The Human Landing System, a key part of NASA’s forthcoming Artemis program, is the lander that will return humans to the moon’s surface for the first time since the days of Apollo. NASA aims to have the human lander touching down at the lunar south pole in 2024.

In April, NASA awarded the HLS contract to a single company — SpaceX, which submitted a $2.9 billion bid. That NASA selected only one company, rather than two, was a surprise (the agency likes to hedge its bets).

At 90, actor William Shatner, the star of the original ''Star Trek'' television series who brought to life the iconic Starship Enterprise as Capt. James Tiberius Kirk, will ''boldly go where no man (his age) has gone before.''

According to a TMZ report Friday, Shatner is slated to become the oldest man in space when he boards the next Blue Origin rocket excursion into low orbit next month.