NASA Moon lander bid losers file protests over $2.9bn SpaceX win

NASA may have awarded SpaceX the Artemis 2024 Moon lander contract, but rival bidders Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin and Dynetics are already protesting the US space agency's decision. The two companies filed protests this week after Elon Musk's SpaceX won a $2.9 billion contract to develop the spacecraft which will return American astronauts to the surface of the Moon.

Announced earlier this month, this latest phase of the NASA Commercial Crew project came a year after the space agency named SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Dynetics as its final three candidates for one of the key elements of the Artemis mission. The Human Landing System, or HLS, will be responsible for taking astronauts back to the lunar surface, but also instrumental in designs for future missions to Mars and potentially beyond.

In a brief presentation on April 16, NASA confirmed that it would be SpaceX alone which clinched the HLS contract. The decision came as a surprise to some, with expectations that NASA would pick two projects so as to have a backup plan should one prove to be delayed or face unforeseen technical challenges. At the time, however, NASA hinted that smaller-than-expected budgets allotted from Congress had forced it to downscale those contracts.

Unsurprisingly, that hasn't gone down well with the two losers. According to Blue Origin, NASA overlooked the challenge of refueling SpaceX's Starship in space, which will be an instrumental – but so far untested – element of Musk's winning proposal. At the same time, Bezos' company argued, NASA had given SpaceX an opportunity to renegotiate its proposed costs, something Blue Origin did not have a chance to do.

"We didn't get a chance to revise and that's fundamentally unfair," Bob Smith, CEO of Blue Origin, told the NYTimes. The company's $6.0 billion bid was more than twice what SpaceX said it could deliver a HLS system for.

Smith also accused NASA of misjudging elements of Blue Origin's proposal, such as the communications system and the redundancy that had been built into systems like navigation. Dynetics – a defense contractor, which planned to tap around 25 different subcontractors for various elements of its HLS – said that it "has issues and concerns with several aspects of the acquisition process as well as elements of NASA's technical evaluation."

Each company has separately filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office, which now has 100 days to reach a decision. NASA declined to comment given "pending litigation"; SpaceX is yet to comment on the complaints. However Elon Musk wasn't so reserved on Twitter, sniping at Blue Origin and Jeff Bezos with a double-entendre regarding the company's challenges at getting a spacecraft to orbit.