Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

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Blue Origin competed for a Human Landing System ("HLS") [0] contract. SpaceX won a contract and Blue Origin did not. Then Blue Origin complained at the GAO and the complaint was rejected. Management is acting like sore losers ever since. They have released graphics badmouthing SpaceX' Starship [1] and are suing NASA now [2]. The prevailing view is that this behaviour is not just sanctioned by CEO Bob Smith but by Jeff Bezos himself.

Search for Blue Origin, HLS and/or GAO for the rest of the story. The coverage by Ars Technica's Eric Berger is usually a good source, you might want to skim the list of his articles [3].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program#Human_Landing_...

[1] https://www.blueorigin.com/assets/blue-origin-hls-national-t...

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/08/16/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-takes...

[3] https://arstechnica.com/author/ericberger/

Edit: thanks verdverm, I added some links and restructured the post

They have even drawn the dimensions of Starship wrong in the graphic.(The length from the hatch should be almost 4 times as long not 3) https://drive.google.com/file/d/11PzZvWXOlV09B4wI9jPA_yRp5N9...

They have, since the GAO decision, released two jerky info graphics and have most recently sued NASA.

Guess they haven't thought about the phrase "don't bite the hand that feeds you" recently

How many people have come off looking good by suing NASA?

Seems like the Venn Diagram of that includes families of astronauts killed on missions, people who had stuff land on their house, and <checks notes> no, that's about it.

Didn't Austrailia sue NASA for littering with skylab?

Is that the 'stuff landing on your house' scenario or are you thinking of a different incident?

Sort of. The local government area where the debris landed (Esperance, in Western Australia) fined NASA $400 for littering.

Which NASA stiffed them on.

SpaceX sued NASA (or at least complained) and won. NASA wanted to award a contract to Space plane Kistler and this was prevented and the contract competed. This however was the GAO and they already rejected Blue complaint.

SpaceX also sued Air Force and won that too.

I'd add that NASASpaceFlight does a great job of covering this in their weekend round tables.

Great place to keep up with all things space related.

In particular, they reflect what most of us are feeling w.r.t. recent BO executive moves vs the engineers hard work and passion

Ah, thanks.

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