Jeff Bezos Sues NASA For Favoritism With SpaceX For The Moon Mission

Jeff Bezos, sues Elon Musk's company for mission to the moon. (photo: @Jeffbezos Instagram Screenshot)

JAKARTA - Jeff Bezos' billionaire space company Blue Origin has filed a lawsuit against the NASA space agency in the United States (US) federal court. NASA is being sued for violating the law's process of evaluating proposals for a human landing system on the Moon to rival SpaceX.

"Blue Origin filed a lawsuit in the US Federal Court of Claims in an attempt to correct deficiencies in the acquisition process found in NASA's Human Landing System (HLS)", said a Blue Origin spokesperson.

The Human Landing System is an important part of NASA's Artemis mission. The program seeks to use private sector contracts to develop, build and test vehicles that will place astronauts at the Moon's South Pole in 2024 for the first time in half a century.

However, Blue Origin claims to have discovered suspicions of favoritism between NASA and SpaceX, as well as problems with the mission.

"We firmly believe that the issues identified in this procurement and the outcome must be addressed to restore justice, create competition, and ensure the safe return of the United States to the Moon", a Blue Origin spokesperson said.

In April 2021, NASA awarded SpaceX the HLS contract, with a bid of USD 2.9 billion. NASA insists it chose only one company, not two because of funding cuts by the US Congress. A few weeks later Jeff Bezos submitted Blue Origin for the Moon landing to NASA with a discounted offer of up to USD 2 billion.

Not as expected, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) decided to only award SpaceX a contract for the NASA mission. With Blue Origin's new lawsuit being filed in the US Federal Claims Court, it's clear that the Bezos company doesn't want to back down from fighting for the mission to the Moon.

On the other hand, Blue Origin said SpaceX's Starship rocket that will take astronauts to the Moon has a system that is too complicated and high risk. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has responded to Blue Origin's claims on Twitter for weeks.

Musk said, "If lobbies and lawyers could get you into orbit, Bezos would be on Pluto (now)", he tweeted.