Government denies Blue Origin’s challenge to NASA’s lunar lander program
The Government Accountability Office squashed Blue Origin’s protest over NASA’s decision to pick a single lunar lander contractor, the agency said Friday, also denying a similar protest from Dynetics. The GAO’s decision keeps Blue Origin’s rival, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the sole winner of NASA’s lucrative Moon lander program and hands a loss to Jeff Bezos, whose space company waged a months-long fight to win the same funding.
In formal protests filed in April, Bezos’ Blue Origin and defense contractor Dynetics accused NASA of running afoul of contracting law when the agency shelved their proposals and gave Musk’s SpaceX a lone $2.9 billion contract to build the country’s first human lunar lander in decades and land a crew on the Moon by 2024. NASA had said it could award up to two companies for the contract, but never committed to that number, and went with SpaceX’s Starship proposal. The GAO found that NASA “reserved the right to make multiple awards, a single award, or no award at all.”
In picking only SpaceX, NASA said it did what it could with the funding it had from Congress. Lawmakers gave NASA a quarter of the roughly $3 billion it requested for its astronaut Moon lander program. In its protest, Blue Origin said NASA should’ve called off the program or retooled it when the agency realized it wouldn’t have had enough money to fund two contractors. But the GAO rejected that argument, saying “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 program.”
