Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin “gambled” with its Moon lander proposal last year by hoping NASA would be willing to negotiate its $5.9 billion price tag, agency attorneys argued in blunt legal filings obtained by The Verge. NASA, cash-strapped with a tight budget from Congress, declined to negotiate and turned down Blue Origin’s lunar lander in April and picked SpaceX’s instead, sparking ongoing protests from Bezos’ space company.
NASA officials haven’t talked much about Blue Origin’s legal quarrels beyond occasional acknowledgements that the company’s protesting — first at a watchdog agency and now in federal court — is holding up the agency’s effort to land humans on the Moon by 2024. But in hundreds of pages of legal filings The Verge obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request, agency attorneys exhaustively laid out NASA’s defense of its Artemis Moon program and doubled down on its decision to pick one company, SpaceX, for the first crewed mission to the lunar surface since 1972.
Round 1: A Costly Bid
In NASA’s main response to Blue Origin’s protest, filed in late May, senior agency attorneys accused the company of employing a sort of door-in-the-face bidding tactic with its $5.9 billion proposal for Blue Moon, the lunar lander Blue Origin is building with a “National Team” that includes Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman. Blue Origin was “able and willing” to offer NASA a lower price for its lunar lander but chose not to because it expected NASA to ask and negotiate for a lower price first, the attorneys allege, citing a six-page declaration written by the company’s senior vice president Brent Sherwood in April.
“a well-funded private space company backed by Jeff Bezos”
In the declaration, Sherwood complains that NASA “did not afford Blue Origin, a well-funded private space company backed by Jeff Bezos, any opportunity to submit a revised business position” when NASA found out it wouldn’t have enough money from Congress to fund two lander proposals. He said Blue Origin had already committed “almost one billion dollars” of corporate contributions and private investments to the Moon lander bid, and “had the financial potential to increase” that.
Backed by the world’s richest man, Blue Origin indicated in its protest that the $5.9 billion price — nearly double SpaceX’s proposal — was partially based on an assumption that NASA would have more than enough money from Congress to pay for the proposal, even as Congress had been indicating a month before Blue Origin submitted its proposal last December that it wouldn’t give NASA all the funding it said it needed. In NASA’s response, the attorneys said companies were instructed to submit their best proposal first. They pointed to seven instances where NASA told bidders its award decision, and whether to pick one or two companies was based on how much funding it’d end up getting from Congress.
But Blue Origin argued that NASA should’ve canceled or changed the terms of the program when Congress voted to give the agency only a quarter of what it requested. Blue Origin has also argued that it was unfair of NASA to only invite SpaceX to tweak parts of its proposal after selecting it for a potential award, one of many claims that NASA attacked over hundreds of pages of legal rebuttals.