Word got out today that the US Court of Federal Claims backed NASA's previous judgement that they violated no laws or requirements by awarding the Human Landing System (HLS) contract to SpaceX and only choosing one contractor instead of two.
The decision wording is rather terse and Eric Ralph at Teslarati voices the opinion that it will probably be a few weeks before more details come out, but Jeff Foust (first link, above) posts the document as of this morning.
Ralph adds:
The ruling ends almost seven months of delays explicitly caused by protests and lawsuits filed by competitors Dynetics and Blue Origin. Protests were first filed with the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) about a week after NASA announced in April 2021 that SpaceX would build the Human Landing System. Both protests were denied in July but Blue Origin ultimately chose to double down and filed a lawsuit against NASA and SpaceX in August, kicking off a process guaranteed to cause several more months of delays.
Not just “guaranteed to cause several more months,” it already had stopped work on the HLS system for the Artemis program. They responded today on twitter that they're going to resume as soon as possible.
The biggest surprise in this whole episode is that Jeff Bezos tweeted a couple of hours later:
Not the decision we wanted, but we respect the court’s judgment, and wish full success for NASA and SpaceX on the contract.
There's an implication there that the lawsuits are ending and maybe NASA and SpaceX can get on with their spacecraft development. The Artemis program's mission statement (my name, not theirs), “With #Artemis, @NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon.” makes me cringe, but it's time to cut the bullshit and get back to designing and testing vehicles.
Hopefully SpaceX has been working quietly on the project without NASA's approval.
ReplyDeleteBezos just needs to go away. Or actually start producing something. My bet is he'll go away.
^^^This.
DeleteI saw a headline that they rolled a New Glenn out of their facility on the Cape this week and thought they actually might have put one together with engines from their testing campaign, but it was just a boilerplate for some test fitting. No engines.
DeleteDid you notice that despite all the structure they had in it to hold it together horizontally, the skin was twisted and warped on the band containing the steerable fins?
DeleteSpaceX was smart enough to realize that ships of this size needed to be built vertically.
Yeah... Saw all of that. Dumbasses. Horizontal construction, like on the Saturn V, works when the structure is overbuilt.
DeleteBO, on the other hand, made their NG as light as they could. And it has no internal pressure structure.
But then again, the early Starship prototypes and test articles all had woogly skin surfaces.
But then again again, SpaceX has always been saying they're testing and fixing and iterating, while BO is acting all contemptuous of SpaceX.
Ah, it's quite a tangled web...
That is what a spaceship on the moon is supposed to look like!
ReplyDelete