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A US watchdog has denied a protest filed in opposition to NASA by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ area exploration firm, Blue Origin, after the area company selected Elon Musk’s SpaceX to construct its subsequent lunar lander.
The Authorities Accountability Workplace (GAO) rejected Blue Origin’s protest on Friday, stating that NASA was inside its rights to pick out a single firm – SpaceX – to construct its lander. NASA signed a contract price nearly $3 billion with SpaceX in April, after earlier saying it could take bids from a number of contractors.
The GAO additionally rejected a protest by protection contractor Dynetix, which additionally hoped to bid for the NASA contract. In a press release, the GAO stated that NASA “reserved the appropriate to make a number of awards, a single award, or no award in any respect.”
When NASA awarded the contract in April, it stated that SpaceX bid was extremely rated and represented “the most effective worth to the federal government.”
Bezos was undeterred, nonetheless, and earlier this week provided NASA $2 billion if the company switched to Blue Origin’s bid. “Blue Origin will bridge [NASA’s] budgetary funding shortfall by waiving all funds within the present and subsequent two authorities fiscal years as much as $2bn to get this system again on monitor proper now,” Bezos wrote to NASA Administrator Invoice Nelson. In return, Bezos needed Blue Origin to get a fixed-priced contract for the development of a spaceship for NASA’s moon mission, slated for roughly 2024.
Along with providing a decrease preliminary bid, SpaceX has expertise working with NASA already, bringing three company astronauts to the Worldwide Area Station final November. The historic flight marked the primary time a commercially-developed rocket was used on an ISS mission.
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Blue Origin has misplaced out to SpaceX within the bidding wars earlier than. NASA leased a launch pad in Florida to Musk’s firm in 2014, after the GAO rejected related protests from Bezos’ agency.
Bezos himself received a small style of area exploration final week, taking a brief journey into suborbital area aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket and capsule. The Amazon CEO and world’s richest individual was “overwhelmed,” nonetheless, by Virgin Galactic CEO Richard Branson, who every week earlier traveled to the sting of the Earth’s environment aboard his firm’s Unity 22 spaceplane. Nonetheless, Blue Origin took difficulty with Branson’s flight, claiming that because the Virgin tycoon hadn’t crossed the Karman Line (100km above sea stage), he wasn’t technically in area.
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