Commercial lunar lander: Musk beats Bezos

Saturday 31 July 2021

commercial lunar landing device
Bezos had to give up on Muskie

In a tender for NASA’s first commercial moon landing, Jeff Bezos was unable to win against Elon Musk. In order to beat its competitors, Amazon’s boss offers money to the space agency, then complains.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos loses in the race for the first commercial lunar landing device: his company Blue Origin was unable to win against billionaire Elon Musk’s rival SpaceX in a related tender by the US space agency NASA after his company, Blue Origin There was also a complaint against was rejected. The Government Accountability Office, an investigative body subordinate to the US Congress, said NASA did not violate any rules in the decision. Complaints from Blue Origin and Dianetics, which also failed to tender, were dismissed.

Earlier, Amazon founder Bezos tried again with a penny offer to change NASA’s mind. Blue Origin would, among other things, cost up to two billion dollars to develop and build a lunar landing device, and over the next two years if the company is allowed to compete against Elon Musk’s rival SpaceX, Bezos has set up a Wrote in an open letter to NASA Chef Bill Nelson. At first NASA didn’t react to it, at least publicly.

NASA wanted to hire two companies

The agency decided against Blue Origin and Dianetics when a tender was issued in April and instead commissioned SpaceX to develop the first commercial landing device that is supposed to take astronauts to the Moon. The contract, known as the Artemis program, cost about $3 billion. Originally, NASA had planned to turn over the two companies.

In the earliest mission for 2024, four astronauts are to be brought into lunar orbit with the spacecraft “Orion”, where two of them will be transferred to the SpaceX landing vehicle for a final approach to the Moon. It therefore aims to develop a fully reusable take-off and landing system that can be used for flights to destinations such as the Moon and Mars.