After coming back from the sting of area, Jeff Bezos has personally waded into Blue Origin’s dispute with NASA over its resolution to award a $2.9 billion lunar lander contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In an open letter to NASA Administrator Invoice Nelson, Bezos mentioned his firm is prepared to waive as much as $2 billion in funds from NASA within the present and subsequent two federal fiscal years in return for a fixed-price lander contract. Bezos mentioned Blue Origin can be prepared to fund its personal pathfinder mission to low-Earth orbit. “This supply shouldn’t be a deferral, however is an outright and everlasting waiver of these funds,” Bezos mentioned within the letter. “This supply gives time for presidency appropriation actions to catch up.”
Whereas Bezos spends a major a part of his letter speaking about Blue Origin’s dedication to “advance America’s future in area,” his supply is not altruistic. On the coronary heart of it’s the perception that NASA unfairly excluded his firm from a profitable and prestigious contract. Relating to its most vital initiatives, NASA has traditionally handed out agreements to a number of contractors to advertise competitors and guarantee it will probably get a mission off the bottom on time if one firm falls not on time. In its newest procurement, NASA did not try this, and Blue Origin filed a protest with the federal authorities shortly after that.
On the time, a Blue Origin spokesperson instructed Engadget NASA “executed a flawed acquisition for the Human Touchdown System program and moved the goalposts on the final minute.” That is one thing Bezos reiterates in his letter. “As an alternative of investing in two competing lunar landers as initially supposed, the Company selected to confer a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar head begin to SpaceX,” the previous Amazon CEO mentioned. “That call broke the mildew of NASA’s profitable industrial area applications by placing an finish to significant competitors for years to return.”
It is exhausting to say how NASA will reply to the open letter. The Human Touchdown System undertaking cannot transfer ahead whereas the US Authorities Accountability Workplace opinions the protest from Blue Origin. Notably, this is not the primary time a Bezos-affiliated firm has obtained itself right into a contract dispute with the US authorities. In 2019, Amazon challenged the Division of Protection’s resolution to award Microsoft its $10 billion Joint Enterprise Protection Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract. After an almost two-year-long authorized battle, the Pentagon canceled that undertaking at first of July in favor of a brand new multi-vendor undertaking that may hand out work to each Amazon and Microsoft.
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