Blue Origin Loses Lawsuit Against NASA Over SpaceX Lunar Lander Contract (cnbc.com) 53
The U.S. Court of Federal Claims ruled against Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin in the company's lawsuit versus NASA over a lucrative astronaut lunar lander contract awarded to Elon Musk's SpaceX earlier this year. Federal judge Richard Hertling sided with the defense in his ruling, completing a months-long battle after Blue Origin sued NASA in August. From a report: Blue Origin, NASA, and SpaceX did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling. NASA in April awarded SpaceX with the sole contract for the agency's Human Landing System program under a competitive process. Worth $2.9 billion, the SpaceX contract will see the company use its Starship rocket to deliver astronauts to the moon's surface for NASA's upcoming Artemis missions.
shocking. (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that their argument consisted of "But we wanted to soak the government for billions of dollars! It's not fair!" I don't think anyone is too surprised at this outcome.
Those that can, do.
Those that can't, sue.
Re:shocking. (Score:5, Insightful)
I view this as a reminder to other aerospace companies that if they want to compete, they need to actually compete. The 50 years of free lunches on the NASA teat is over. Step your game up if you want to actually win contracts, as it should be.
Re: shocking. (Score:4, Insightful)
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"I do not want to spend more money for competitions sake when the government has a contractor that delivers reliably."
Even at supposedly inflated prices (which is one reason you want actual competition), SpaceX is cheaper than "the big boys".
Re: shocking. (Score:2)
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The way it works (or it doesn't, if you choose to consider so) is that a contract is signed - a specific sum for a specific target (for example, a launcher able to put 12 tons into LEO).
Now, the launch platform is in New York City and the launcher is able to put 12 tons into LEO - but the Government wants now 12 tons into an equatorial LEO. As this target was not put into the original contract, an addenda to the contract is signed - and the contract is now 12 tons into equatorial LEO for 20% more.
Now, the G
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Re: shocking. (Score:3, Informative)
Nor do I, but congress only gave them enough money for one company, and even then, only for the cheapest bid.
If we want multiple viable lunar landers, congress needs to pay for them.
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Logic, fiscal responsibility... this is slashdot pal, if we dream something, "poof" the government just makes it appear.
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So we vote out all these people who are wasting our money, vote in people who promise that they will be better with our money only to waste it on a different project.
Re:shocking. (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA is so very, very far from making one space company the only recipient of contracts I'm unsure how you could think that it was doing that. And if there were one such company, it would not be SpaceX, it would be United Launch Alliance, which is, itself, a joint enterprise of Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
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Bezos wanted the contract to get Blue Origin some credibility.
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Another path to credibility would be to accomplish something more than what NASA was done with in 1962.
Get into orbit already.
Re:shocking. (Score:4, Insightful)
> *giving* it a huge head-start
1. Was SpaceX already ahead by a large margin -OR-
2. Was SpaceX and Blue Origin roughly equal and NASA went with SpaceX thereby giving them a head-start / advantage?
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SpaceX is not a company fighting for external contracts or subsidies.
They had a plan for what to do, and they kept working on it and do what they _wanted_ to do.
All this "Falcon" and "Falcon Heavy" and "Starship" are just steps on a ladder.
They don't work for contracts, or for subsidies, or for something else. The "falcon this" and "starship that" are vehicles for their dreams (some of which are just dreams, i.e. they'll never live to see them - like a Mars colony, and some of which are within grasping i.e.
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While I agree in principal, were there any other players in the game at the moment that could:
A) Actually produce a finished product in a reasonable time frame.
And/or
B) Do so at a cost that NASA could afford.
Blue Origin being the one to sue over it made the absolute least amount of sense. Had it been some other player with the engineering expertise to actually step up to the plate, they'd at least have a shot of being heard by somebody not laughing behind their hand. Blue Origin isn't fit to shine Spac
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SpaceX had to show they could (reliably) get to space before they got a contract. BO has a couple vanity flights, and they're not cheaper.
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Odd. Not many private entities make a point of hiring multiple contractors to do redundant work.
NASA contracting a single company to do *everything* might be bad, but giving a contract to a single company to do a specific thing is standard.
NASA (and the US military) do this to trade oodles of money for more assurance that you'll get something workable at the end of a long development period, and also to subsidize the development of a competitive private market. Those are good things, and important goals for
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It's like in this old joke:
...
- Hey private, do you see those tanks over there?
- Yes sir,
- Here is a grenade, go and deal with them!
- Yes sir,
- Sir, I dealt with the tanks.
- Good job private, now hand back the grenade.
To answer your suggestion - of course it would be great to have redundancy, but considering requested schedules, deadlines and appropriated money, NASA does it's best to achieve the Moon landing this decade - even SpaceX (by far the lowest bid) had to lower their final price due to funding NA
Re:shocking. (Score:4, Insightful)
Then Blue Origin needs to get off their ass, stop sending egotistical people into near orbit and actually build something that NASA could use.
NASA awarded the contract to SpaceX because SpaceX has demonstrated they can actually do what NASA needs, namely ISS resupply and crew transfer.
When Blue Origin demonstrates that capability I'm sure NASA will consider them as well.
Musk is smart in that he uses NASA contracts to pay for SpaceX, so the billionaire space tourism thing can be partially taxpayer subsidized. Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin are just self-funded ego boosters for their founders and don't currently serve any commercial use other than tourism.
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"Musk is smart in that he uses NASA contracts to pay for SpaceX, so the billionaire space tourism thing can be partially taxpayer subsidized."
I think the billionaire space tourism is also subsidizing SpaceX.
SpaceX has goals higher than "let's go into the easiest definition of cosmos with some tourists".
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as a result giving it a huge head-start over the competition when it comes to the commercialization of space. It wasn't great when NASA had a de-facto monopoly on shoving stuff into space
SpaceX is a monopoly insofar as they are the only company with a viable product that is either already proven or in the final stages of approval into getting a moon orbiting product off the ground (pun intended). And once the Starship vessel is complete and can land back on earth, it is a zero effort extension to get it to land on the moon, since the gravity well is much shallower. Maybe if Bezos actually had a product that could compete, he'd have a leg to stand on. But he doesn't. Until someone else comes
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" it is a zero effort extension to get it to land on the moon, since the gravity well is much shallower"
You should remember that the Falcon first stage, when landing on the drone barge, has _minimum_ engine thrust higher than the weight of the stage.
Basically the minimum power is too high for the rocket to "hover". In a way it's like staying at 30 mph (50 km/h) with a 250+ horse power car - you touch the accelerator and, before you know it, you went from "legal speed" to... (well, Space Balls and Tesla pun
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I don't like the idea of NASA making one space company the only recipient of contracts
OK, so start a space launch company, and build it up to the point where it can actually do the stuff that the contracts ask for? Done?
I'll give you a hint: NASA doesn't want there to be only one company that can receive the contracts, either!
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"It wasn't great when NASA had a de-facto monopoly on shoving stuff into space, but at least back then there wasn't really much option"
Based on current results, there isn't much option now...
I mean you might want a company that:
- has a proven record in increasing its "tons per month" sent to space
- has a proven record in increasing its "tons per launch" sent to space
- has valid plans for the future (both in "tons per month" and in "tons per launch")
- bonus if it's cheaper than the competition
Right now, the
Re: shocking. (Score:2)
chump change.
bezo could finance his own x self sustaining moon enterprise for under 10 billion dollars
Good! (Score:2)
The courts finally gave Butthurt Bezos' Blue Origins its second rightfully deserved ass kicking. Two down, eleventy-seven million to go!
Thats not good (Score:5, Insightful)
Now Bezos is going to bitch and moan about not getting the contract, and sick his lawyers on NASA so we can all lose tax money. The real problem is Blue Orgin is just not up to snuff. Even the employees say it's toxic to work there.
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How could employees think it's toxic to work at a company that literally exists only to design a giant phallus and stroke the ego of a rich billionaire? Whiners! The lot of them. They should be happy to both design a prick and work for one at the same time, most people only get to do one of those things.
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Perhaps they would be somewhere if they spent more time working on their space craft, rather than filing lawsuits and whining like a libtard snowflake.
I believe Marmalade Mussolini has both the snowflake and whining markets cornered.
Now they will sue the U.S. Court of Federal Claims (Score:2)
Waahhh (Score:2)
The world’s richest man all of a sudden doesn’t like capitalism.
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Second richest.
I'll shut up once (Score:2)
Bezos actually gets a Blue Origin spacecraft, umm into space/orbit.
They're hiring out for the launching of their satellites.
I hope it's probably a matter of time until their launches are anything more than a breathy yo-yo...
Ideally Congress would have given NASA more money (Score:2)
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Alas, Congress didn't agree that going back to the moon was all that important. Of course, Congress might have been more generous if Blue Origin had actually reached orbit on its own.
Mind you, Blue Origin is most of the way there when it comes to a lunar lander. DeltaV requirements for landing from lunar orbit, and take-off back to lunar orbit are in the timezone of what Blue Origin has already achieved (deltaV requirements for the luna
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"DeltaV requirements for landing from lunar orbit, and take-off back to lunar orbit are in the timezone of what Blue Origin has already achieved"
We bought one horseshoe, we need three more and the horse.
If my reading of this reddit thread of delta_v_map_of_the_solar_system is right, the total to Moon is some 15 km/s and back (aerobraking in atmosphere) is some 5.5 km/s.
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And yet, in 1969, we landed on the moon with a Lunar Module that couldn't do 15 km/s on its best day. Two stages, each good for a bit less than 2 km/s. Do remember that the lander (the subject of the conversation) doesn't have to carry fuel to lift off from Earth. It gets lofted by something else. Nor does it have to go from LEO to lunar
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You could say that Blue Origin didn't meet the minimum requirements but that might be biased because Space X is doing so amazingly well. Note that if Blue Origin doesn't meet the minimum standards then United Launch Alliance, which came in third, doesn't either. That makes the bidding seem a little fixed if the incumbent can't meet the bar. It definitely seems like NASA raised the bar after congress cut the funding. The bid may have cost 100s of millions to put together. I could definitely see why Blue Origin feels cheated.
Not sure where you got any of this, but it bears little resemblance to what's actually been going on.
First, yes, the bids did cost hundreds of millions to put together. NASA paid for it all when they selected the three lander proposals to compete, awarding a whopping $579 million to Blue Origin, a lessor but still huge $253 million to the Dynetics mob, and a not-insignificant $135 million to SpaceX. For $967 million, close enough to a billion dollars as to make little difference, NASA got... a pile of pap
Say it with me (Score:2)
Nelson said it best (Score:2)
Of Course They Sued (Score:2)
When you lose a multi-billion dollar contract, of course you're going to sue to try to get another chance at it. It's just too much money to give up on. Sure, you're probably going to lose a few million on legal fees, but you'll make a thousand times that if you win, so even if there's only a very small chance, you go for it.
That said, Blue Origin has been pushing the legal strategy a bit far. With any other company, there would have been an equal lobbying push to get Congress to allocate funds for the s
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When you lose a multi-billion dollar contract, of course you're going to sue to try to get another chance at it.
I think the only country in the world where:
a) anyone would try it
b) the court would not instantly dismiss the case
Is the USA.
You simply can not sue in a san country for "not getting a contract" - that is absolutely absurd.
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Oh you can sue in other countries too
https://www.ispreview.co.uk/in... [ispreview.co.uk]
Admittedly this was only worth a mere $600 million. Fortunately the company that lost the bid lost the case in court. They are something of another Blue Origin with repeated failures to deliver much smaller broadband contracts in rural areas elsewhere in the UK. Hardly surprising the Scottish government choose not award them a contract.
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You can sue if you think the "government" side did not follow due procedure.
But good luck in winning the case, and then actually being able to acquire a future contract.
Response (Score:3)
Elon's response was to post the Judge Dredd meme captioned "You have been judged."
The idiot reporter at Yahoo incorrectly identified the meme as coming from the 1995 movie. The CNBC reporter correctly identified it as coming from Karl Urban's 2012 rendition. Isn't Yahoo basically nothing but sports and entertainment (i.e. movies) these days? You had one job Yahoo, and you couldn't even get that right.
NASA didn't respond directly to the CNBC reporter but did issue a statement that work would resume as soon as possible. Presumably as soon as their lawyers finish checking for procedural landmines. Elon will have to begrudgingly allow engineers to resume HLS design, rather than keeping everyone fixated on getting Starship to orbit.
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Addendum: NASA will lift the work stoppage order on Monday. Hope SpaceX is ready. NASA still has dreams of landing something in 2024.
I really hope astronauts arriving at Gateway Station in an Orion capsule will be able to take a picture out the window, so we get to see a real photo of the silliness that will be HLS Starship docked with a station it dwarfs.
SpaceX was the obvious choice. (Score:2)
Bezos needs the money haha (Score:1)