With their space companies SpaceX and Blue Origin, the two ultra-rich Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk are engaged in a bitter competition. He is now even going to court – in the form of a lawsuit against NASA. Obviously, it’s just not about the matter.
Who will land on the moon first? This race from the sixties is just repeating itself. But this time he does not find his way between deeply hostile nations as a symbol of the struggle between the capitalist West and the socialist East – but as a private feud between two of the richest men in the world. Elon Musk is currently one step ahead: his company SpaceX is to build a new lunar lander on behalf of NASA. But competitor Jeff Bezos has not given up yet. And now try it by court.
With a lawsuit against the US space agency, the Amazon founder wants to prevent the order. There were errors in the procurement process, argues his company Blue Origin. “We are very sure that there were legitimate disputes about the procurement process and its result,” the company told “Space News”. “They need to be educated to restore fairness, create competition, and enable America to return to the moon safely.”
Unfair allocation?
In particular, the award of the equivalent of around 2.5 billion euros to SpaceX seems to bother Blue Origins management. In a graphic reminiscent of a pamphlet, the company attacked the competitor,.
Officially, the lawsuit is about the award procedure. After the space agency had not ruled out commissioning several companies with the construction of a lunar lander in the tender, only the company of Tesla founder Elon Musk was ultimately awarded the contract. According to insider reports to its own employees, the management of Blue Origin was sure about the money, reports “Ars Technica”. SpaceX simply made the cheapest offer.
Cheaper offer
The US audit office has already contradicted this, however: NASA had communicated from the start that it would also depend on the budget, whether one company or several would get the contract, the agency said. Because the US Congress only released a quarter of the amount requested, it was only one. Blue Origin does not recognize this. “We stick to our assessment that SpaceX receives preferential treatment,” said the company in a statement.
SpaceX’s offering is around half cheaper than Blue Origin’s. One of the reasons: Musk’s company agreed to shoulder a large part of the development costs for the lander itself. Blue Origin, on the other hand, didn’t want to contribute more than two billion dollars.
Employees are frustrated
The lawsuit does not seem to be particularly well received by the employees. Several employees complained to “Ars” that they could do little with the course of corporate management. They find the attacks on NASA and SpaceX counterproductive and unsporting. “Personally, I don’t think the majority of employees are behind the graphics and the PR campaigns,” complained an anonymous employee at Reddit. “Everyone I spoke to about it found it disgusting and embarrassing to be seen like this in public.”
In fact, Bezos might not just be interested in the order for the lunar lander. Tesla boss Elon Musk was the only one who briefly overtook him as the richest person in the world since Bezos was able to conquer this title. In addition, employees of Blue Origin believe that the Amazon founder sees himself as the real reason why moon landings are being talked about again at all. According to “Ars Technica”, he sees his efforts in 2017 to convince Donald Trump of the project as an occasion for the resumption of the lunar program by NASA. “He believes that there would be no program for a lunar lander without Blue Origin,” one employee is convinced.
Bezos himself had actually declared such a campaign embarrassing – when it wasn’t about his own company. “These days there would be protests and the losers would sue the government,” he joked at an Apollo 11 landing event in 2019. “It’s already funny today. The processes are now being slowed down more by the allocation processes than by technological problems.” With his lawsuit, he is now contributing to it himself: NASA has frozen the project until it has been clarified.
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