In a letter to current NASA administrator Bill Nelson, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said his company could give up more than two billion dollars in funding if NASA awarded it a manned lunar landing system contract.
The United States wants to establish a lasting human presence on the Moon. To do this, NASA is developing the Artemis program, under which the agency was to award one or more contracts to develop manned landing systems. Three companies applied:SpaceX (for $2.9 billion), Blue Origin (for $5.99 billion), and Dynetics (for $9 billion).
Last April, NASA finally set its sights on SpaceX to turn its Starship vehicle into an Artemis lander, arguing, among other reasons, that the money allocated by Congress would not was enough to support the development of only one system.
The decision had not been accepted by the two competing companies, which quickly filed protests with the US Government Accountability Office, pointing out that NASA should have awarded at least two contracts to maintain the principle of competition in this programme, as it had initially planned. The GAO has until August 4 to rule on the protests.
In the meantime, the situation began to evolve in favor of Blue Origin. The US Senate has indeed passed a bill allowing the release of ten billion dollars for the development of additional private lunar landers. Bill Nelson, the current NASA administrator, had lobbied Congress for additional funding so he could support a second lunar landing vendor regardless of the outcome of the GAO protests.
To give himself every chance of being able to benefit from this budget extension, Jeff Bezos has taken the lead. In a July 26 letter to Bill Nelson, Bezos said the company could renounce $2 billion in the early years of the Artemis program if NASA awarded it a contract similar to that of SpaceX. Blue Origin would also be ready to finance a first demonstration mission itself.
"We stand ready to help NASA moderate its technical risks and resolve its budget constraints and put the Artemis program back on a more competitive, credible, and sustainable path. “, writes in particular Bezos in this letter, according to Spacenews. "This offer is not a deferral, but an outright waiver of these payments “, he continues. “NASA deviated from its original dual-source acquisition strategy due to perceived short-term budget concerns, and this offer removes that barrier “.
The approach is naturally clever, since Bezos provides a solution to the problem posed a few months ago by NASA, namely the lack of funding.
Bezos adds that Blue Origin would accept a fixed price contract. In the event of an agreement, NASA would therefore allocate funding to Blue Origin in exchange for its services. It is then up to Blue Origin to manage to satisfy NASA's requests with this envelope. Previously, the American agency indeed tended to write "blank checks", which encouraged cost overruns.
