Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin sues NASA, escalating its fight for a Moon lander contract

Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origin brought its fight against NASA’s Moon program to federal court on Monday, doubling down on accusations that the agency wrongly evaluated its lunar lander proposal. The complaint escalates a monthslong crusade by the company to win a chunk of lunar lander funds that was only given to its rival, Elon Musk’s SpaceX and comes weeks after Blue Origin’s first protest over the Moon program was squashed by a federal watchdog agency. Now in court, Blue Origin’s challenge could add another pause to SpaceX’s contract and a new lengthy delay to NASA’s race to land astronauts on the Moon by 2024.

Blue Origin’s complaint, filed with the US Court of Federal Claims, was shrouded behind a protective order. The company is broadly challenging NASA’s decision to pick SpaceX for the lunar lander award, and “more specifically … challenges NASA’s unlawful and improper evaluation of proposals submitted under the HLS Option A BAA,” according to its request to file its complaint under seal.

Blue Origin was one of three firms vying for a contract to land NASA’s first astronauts on the Moon since 1972. In April, NASA shelved the company’s $5.9 billion proposal of its Blue Moon landing system and went with SpaceX’s $2.9 billion Starship proposal instead, opting to pick just one company for the project after saying it might pick two. Limited funding from Congress only allowed one contract, NASA has argued.

Blue Origin filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) less than two weeks after SpaceX’s award was announced, arguing NASA should’ve canceled or changed the terms of the program when it learned it wouldn’t have had enough money to fund two separate contracts. It also alleged NASA unfairly negotiated the terms of SpaceX’s proposal before making the award, without giving the same opportunities to Blue Origin and Dynetics. The GAO rejected those arguments in late July and deemed NASA’s decision fair and lawful.

That protest prevented SpaceX from starting its contract for 95 days while the GAO adjudicated the case. Now in federal claims court, Blue Origin’s latest challenge could trigger another delay. The company alerted the court last week of its impending lawsuit and signaled to the judge that it will seek an order to pause SpaceX’s contract while the case is adjudicated, according to a person familiar with the notice who’s not authorized to speak publicly about litigation. If the judge grants Blue Origin’s request, the pause to SpaceX’s contract could potentially last even longer, putting a major dent in the timeline of NASA’s Artemis program.

After losing its GAO protest, Blue Origin waved its frustration out in the open through statements and snarky white papers dangling the prospect of another legal fight in court and attacking SpaceX’s Starship system as inefficient. “We stand firm in our belief that there were fundamental issues with NASA’s decision,” the company said in a statement after the GAO ruling, “but the GAO wasn’t able to address them due to their limited jurisdiction.” In one infographic posted on its website, Blue Origin said “there are an unprecedented number of technologies, developments, and operations that have never been done before for Starship to land on the Moon.”

Blue Origin pitched its Blue Moon lunar lander with a “National Team” of established aerospace contractors that included Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin, signaling that the technical expertise from those companies would fill in for Blue Origin’s limited spaceflight experience.

SpaceX’s Starship is a fully reusable rocket system that the company has been building in south Texas. Starship, as proposed to NASA, would require at least eight launches of a fuel tanker version of Starship that would supply fuel to a lunar lander version of Starship before trekking to the lunar surface. Blue Origin pounced on that complexity as a weakness and a reason NASA should’ve picked a second company.

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