Max Q - Blue Origin really wants that lander gig

Blue Origin seems super determined to not let its loss to SpaceX for a human lander contract go quietly, while Rocket Lab picks up a couple of interesting new clients. Welcome to a whole new kind of space race.

Blue Origin files a federal suit against NASA

Jeff Bezos’ companies are accumulating a history of issuing legal challenges against government entities when bids for the business of those same entities don’t go their way: First there was the AWS/JEDI mess with the Pentagon, and now Blue Origin has lodged a complaint with a federal court over NASA’s handling of its human lunar lander contract.

NASA announced that it would be looking for commercial suppliers to provide transportation for its Artemis program astronauts from lunar orbit to the lunar surface last year. The contract could include multiple providers, the agency said, but when time came to actually award a winner, it declared SpaceX and its in-development Starship reusable spacecraft the sole winner.

Blue Origin, along with third bidder Dynetics, took issue to this decision and protested it when it was announced. Both NASA’s own review and the review of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that Blue Origin’s protest (and the separate Dynetics one) were unfounded. Most of the time with issues like these, that would be that.

But Blue Origin has filed suit against NASA, taking its protest a step further. That’s on top of the war it’s been waging on awardee SpaceX separately, with infographics it created to highlight exactly why it believed the Musk-led commercial space rival wasn’t a good pick.

The GAO’s own rebuttal of the original Blue Origin protest is already a very thorough, point-by-point rebuke, so it’s hard to see how a federal court will take this suit all that seriously given the implications for NASA’s bidding process and the existing accountability checks in place. Still, that might be exactly what Blue Origin is counting on — if it’s building up a dossier for a more grandiose and fundamental legal attack on how NASA’s overall bidding process works currently.

Rocket Lab taps partners in space manufacturing and space waste

Rocket Lab’s two latest clients are both interesting partners that should help the launch company advance some nascent new space technologies. It announced last week that it will be supplying its Photon spacecraft to Varda Space Industries for outfitting with Varda’s in-space manufacturing tech, and then today it revealed it’ll be working with Finnish company Aurora Propulsion Technologies to help the latter test its space junk removal tech.

Both of these new clients are good examples of where Rocket Lab fits in terms of the overall launch market: A boutique provider of dedicated launch services, with a flexibility that can work with the shifting requirements that are often a hallmark of novel technologies and space startup businesses.

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