Blue Origin boldly goes to court over Nasa's "improper" contract with SpaceX

After his trip to space Jeff Bezos is now heading to court, as his Blue Origin rocket company has launched a lawsuit over NASA's awarding of a moon landing contract to rival Elon Musk’s SpaceX. In April this year, SpaceX won a US$2.9bn Human Landing System (HLS) contract to land Nasa astronauts on the moon as part of the Artemis program. Although SpaceX has carried out multiple more commercial trips to space with its reusable rockets than its rivals, Nasa was expected to add a second rocket company to the contract. It was reported at the time that Nasa had budgetary concerns and that Musk’s company had cut the cost of their lander. On the back of Bezos’s successful trip above the Kármán line on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket, the company offered Nasa $2bn to help sweeten the pill on the lunar lander contract and issued a protest to the US Government Accountability Office (GAO). Both were denied, so Blue Origin yesterday filed a federal lawsuit challenging the contract award, saying Nasa had made “unlawful and improper evaluation of proposals”. Nasa needs to respond to the challenge by 12 October.