NASA is free to work alone with Elon Musk’s company SpaceX for a manned moon mission. A complaint from Jeff Bezos, who wanted to force a contract from his company Blue Origin, has been rejected.
SpaceX won the tender for the new moon mission in April. NASA chose this company because the price was 2.4 billion euros lower than that of Blue Origin and the company has already achieved good results with its Falcon rocket and Dragon capsules.
Bezos immediately filed a complaint with the US government regulator, the GAO. He blamed NASA that the space agency had reneged on its promise to award the contract to multiple companies.
The GAO now rules that NASA had no choice, because less money was made available for the new space program than initially assumed. The GAO also points out that SpaceX’s significantly lower bid: Blue Orgin charged twice more.
Elon Musk had only a brief response:
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