Jeff Bezos is clearly not ready to "let go" of NASA's proposed manned lunar landing contract. Blue Origin has just released an infographic highlighting the "extreme complexity" of a mission involving SpaceX's Starship. A desperate… and hopeless manoeuvre?
As you know, NASA has set its sights on SpaceX to transform its future Starship interplanetary spacecraft into a lander for the Artemis program, which aims to return the first humans to the Moon since the Apollo program. However, it is a decision that Blue Origin, which would also compete for this contract, had not been accepted, arguing that the American agency should have awarded at least two contracts to maintain the principle of competition as it had " I promise".
In this sense, Blue Origin quickly filed a protest with the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) of the United States, which has just dismissed the complaint.
However, Jeff Bezos is obviously not ready to let go of this contract . A few days ago, the founder of Blue Origin had indeed already pointed out that his company could give up more than two billion dollars in funding if NASA awarded him a contract for a manned lunar landing system.
More recently, the company also released an infographic shared on Twitter by NasaSpaceFlight's Adrian Beil. According to this graph, SpaceX's proposed approach would be "extremely complex and high risk ", while the one offered by Blue Origin appears to be "safe, low risk and fast ".
In this infographic, Blue Origin claims that SpaceX will need to complete ten fuel-filled Starship launches to get a single craft to the Moon. Naturally, orbital refueling has always been part of SpaceX's plans, but the company hasn't yet communicated on the number of maneuvers needed for such a manned mission . For now, we do not know where these figures come from.
You have understood that Blue Origin really has a hard time accepting defeat, to the point of trying this type of maneuver. "The majority of Blue Origin employees I've met are bright, friendly, hard-working people who joined the company because they believed in their mission" , wrote in a tweet Eric Berger, space specialist at Ars Technica. “They also respect what SpaceX does and probably find this kind of thing embarrassing ".
Meanwhile, at Starbase, everyone is on deck with Super Heavy Booster 4 and Starship SN20 preparations, ahead of the duo meeting at the launch site . Both structures will soon undergo a series of ground tests before considering a first orbital flight in a few weeks.
