Bezos’ Blue Origin loses lawsuit against NASA over SpaceX lunar lander contract | Hacker News Reader

Bezos’ Blue Origin loses lawsuit against NASA over SpaceX lunar lander contract

cnbc.com

44 pointsdangle111 comments

Why not just fund your own mission to the moon? But with less cowboy hats, insensitive comments to the non-billionaires among us and less using of actors as props...

The SpaceX bid basically won because SpaceX said "yeah we're going to spend to fund this capability anyway, hey NASA, want to come along for the ride?"

versus Blue Origin and the others bids saying essentially "you're funding this project entirely".

And thus, SpaceX's bid was a lot less than theirs.

I'm a bit shocked this got decided this quickly. This is on the order of months, isn't it? Then again with this much money and visibility, it probably gets the wheels turning faster.

Or is that a reflection of how little water the complaint had?

> The SpaceX bid basically won because SpaceX said "yeah we're going to spend to fund this capability anyway, hey NASA, want to come along for the ride?"

That was part of why SpaceX won but not the whole story. The US government has rules against contractors offering subsidised or excessively discounted services, because it has been burnt before by contractors who offer massive discounts to win the deal initially and then jack up the price once the government is hooked and switching costs have locked them in; many companies will see those initial discounts/subsidies/freebies as an investment to be recouped from the government at a later date.

However, SpaceX is allowed to do it because they convinced NASA their co-investment was commercial, that they have commercially realistic plans to use Starship for Starlink, commercial satellite launch, DearMoon and other space tourism missions in the future. By contrast, Bezos promises to tip billions of his own money in (only after BO lost the contract), but BO has no believable plan to commercialise their lander for other customers. That is why SpaceX can legally discount through co-investment, BO will find that much harder.

> I'm a bit shocked this got decided this quickly. This is on the order of months, isn't it?

Keep in mind this is a specialist court which only hears cases against the federal government, and many of those cases are contractors challenging government contract awards. It is in the government’s own interest to make those cases go as fast as possible, so they write the rules to encourage speed and provide the necessary funding—and the judges know what is expected of them and they oblige, especially because this is an Article I court not an Article III court, so it does not have life tenure, only a 15 year term. Gives judges greater motivation to keep the government happy, in case they want another appointment (maybe even one with life tenure this time) once their 15 year term is up.

SpaceX bid was simply superior along every dimension. Even with NASA frankly suboptimal evaluation SpaceX came out ahead.

NASA had agreed to a stop work in exchange for an accelerated timeline for resolving the suit.

And even then, while it probably did disrupt things a little, SpaceX is moving forward with starship development with or without NASA under injunction. So its not like the injunction was holding up a custom rocket design, just the "what are we putting in the rocket" design.

Which combined with what Casey Handmer has said about Starship causing a sea change in relaxing design constraints on weight and size, is probably not a huge delay.

For the same reason that they are billionaires in the first place. They want the profit, but don't want to pay the production cost.

In this case they want the government to pay, which is ironic considering their core business's margins in both the case of Musk and Bezos are centered around tax avoidance.

Blue Orgin says they should have been awarded the contract because SpaceX isn't safe enough? Is that the gist?

In the court case, one of their key arguments was about “Flight Readiness Reviews” (FRRs). Standard NASA practice on commercial missions is to have a review meeting (the FRR) before each launch where NASA and the commercial provider agree the mission is ready to proceed. Often, the FRR is a contract milestone and its successful completion triggers a part payment from NASA to the provider.

When designing the requirements for HLS, NASA was expecting a mission architecture with only 1-3 launches, not the multiple refuelling flights SpaceX plans. With only 1-3 launches, having an FRR before each launch makes sense; with all these refuelling flights it starts to become bureaucratic overkill. So SpaceX proposed, and NASA accepted, a single consolidated FRR for all refuelling flights. Problem is, that violates the explicit wording of the binding bid requirements document published by NASA, and so technically counts as a waiver of a NASA requirement for SpaceX. BO tried to make a big deal of this before GAO, arguing it was unfair that NASA waived a requirement for SpaceX but didn’t waive any requirement for BO, and also calling it a “safety requirement” (technically true but this waiver does not cause any realm harm to safety.) They lost before GAO, it ruled the waiver wasn’t material. They tried the same argument before the Court, and obviously the Court has rejected it too, but we’ll have to wait for their published reasons to see if their reasons for rejecting the argument are the same as GAO’s or somewhat different

Its more like 'NASA said that they would award 2 contracts and then didn't'. NASA wanted 2 contracts but the bid was always set up so that NASA could select however many they want.

They made some token reference to suboptimal things in SpaceX proposal but technically they never had a leg to stand on.

They both need refueling in space, but National Team needs hydrogen refueling in orbit of the moon and Starship needs Methane refueling in orbit of Earth.

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