Bezos Offers to Cover Up to $2 Billion in Costs if NASA Awards Human Landing System Contract to National Team
Editor’s Note: The Government Accountability Office is due to announce a ruling on Aug. 4 concerning the protests lodged by the Blue Origin-led National Team and Dynetics over NASA’s decision to award SpaceX a single-source contract for the Human Landing System that will take astronauts to the lunar surface. The letter below seems as much aimed at Congress, which could provide funds for a second contract, as it is to NASA.
Jeff Bezos Letter to NASA Administrator Bill Nelson
In an open letter to the NASA Administrator, Jeff Bezos offers to restore competition to the Human Landing System program by closing NASA’s near-term budgetary shortfall and producing a safe and sustainable lander that will return Americans to the surface of the Moon – this time to stay.
The Honorable Bill Nelson
Administrator
National Aeronautics & Space Administration
300 E Street, SW
Washington, DC 20546
Dear Administrator Nelson:
Blue Origin is committed to building a future where millions of people live and work in space to benefit the Earth. We are convinced that, to advance America’s future in space, NASA must now quickly and assuredly return to the Moon. NASA has the opportunity to again inspire a whole new generation of scientists, engineers, and explorers.
This is why Blue Origin answered NASA’s urgent call to develop a Human Landing System. We built the National Team – with four major partners and more than 200 small and medium suppliers in 47 states – to focus on designing, building, and operating a flight system the nation could count on. NASA invested over half a billion dollars in the National Team in 2020-21, and we performed well. The team developed and risk-reduced a safe, mass-efficient design that could achieve a human landing in 2024.
Our approach is designed to be sustainable for repeated lunar missions and, above all, to keep our astronauts safe. We created a 21st-century lunar landing system inspired by the well-characterized Apollo architecture — an architecture with many benefits. One of its important benefits is that it prioritizes safety. As NASA recognized, the National Team’s design offers a “comprehensive approach to aborts and contingencies [that] places a priority on crew safety throughout all mission phases.”
Unlike Apollo, our approach is designed to be sustainable and to grow into permanent, affordable lunar operations. Our lander uses liquid hydrogen for fuel. Not only is hydrogen the highest-performing rocket fuel, but it can also be mined on the Moon. That feature will prove essential for sustained future operations on the Moon and beyond.
From the beginning, we designed our system to be capable of flying on multiple launch vehicles, including Falcon Heavy, SLS, Vulcan, and New Glenn. The value of being able to fly on many different launch vehicles cannot be over-stated. Launch vehicle flexibility is a massive overall risk reduction for both initial and sustaining operations. It decouples any risks associated with launch vehicle stand-downs and ensures competitive launch pricing in perpetuity. Again, NASA recognized this valuable feature when it stated that our design permitted “a launch approach that provides flexibility and minimizes risk. Blue Origin’s initial HLS mission requires only three commercial launches. This very low number…lowers the risk of mission failure due to launch anomalies. This risk is further reduced by the fact that Blue’s HLS elements are capable of interfacing with multiple commercial launch vehicles (CLVs), leaving Blue Origin with near-term options regarding choice of launch vehicle.”
Yet, in spite of these benefits and at the last minute, the Source Selection Official veered from the Agency’s oft-stated procurement strategy. Instead of investing in two competing lunar landers as originally intended, the Agency chose to confer a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar head start to SpaceX. That decision broke the mold of NASA’s successful commercial space programs by putting an end to meaningful competition for years to come. It also eliminated the benefits of utilizing the broad and capable supply base of the National Team (as opposed to funding the vertically-integrated SpaceX approach) and locks every trip to the Moon into 10+ Super Heavy/Starship launches just to get a single lander to the surface. By the Agency’s own admission, it bets our return to the Moon on a single solution of “immense complexity and heightened risk associated with the very high number of events necessary to execute the front end [with] risk of operational schedule delays.”
Instead of this single source approach, NASA should embrace its original strategy of competition. Competition will prevent any single source from having insurmountable leverage over NASA. Without competition, a short time into the contract, NASA will find itself with limited options as it attempts to negotiate missed deadlines, design changes, and cost overruns. Without competition, NASA’s short-term and long-term lunar ambitions will be delayed, will ultimately cost more, and won’t serve the national interest.
In the past few weeks, the shortfalls of this single source selection have been recognized, and NASA has begun to solicit new lunar lander proposals. But, unfortunately, this new approach won’t create true competition because it is rushed, it is unfunded, and it provides a multi-year head-start to the one funded, single-source supplier. The Appendix N and LETS solicitations are just optical substitutes for the real competition that a second, simultaneous dissimilar lander development will provide. The Agency must act now to create the real competition it needs, and it should not repeat work already delivered and investments already made.
In April (prior to your confirmation as NASA administrator), only one HLS bidder, SpaceX, was offered the opportunity to revise their price and funding profile, leading to their selection. Blue Origin was not offered the same opportunity. That was a mistake, it was unusual, and it was a missed opportunity. But it is not too late to remedy. We stand ready to help NASA moderate its technical risks and solve its budgetary constraints and put the Artemis Program back on a more competitive, credible, and sustainable path. Our Appendix H HLS contract is still open and can be amended.
With that in mind and on behalf of the National Team, we formally offer the following for your consideration:
- Blue Origin will bridge the HLS budgetary funding shortfall by waiving all payments in the current and next two government fiscal years up to $2B to get the program back on track right now. This offer is not a deferral, but is an outright and permanent waiver of those payments. This offer provides time for government appropriation actions to catch up.
- Blue Origin will, at its own cost, contribute the development and launch of a pathfinder mission to low-Earth orbit of the lunar descent element to further retire development and schedule risks. This pathfinder mission is offered in addition to the baseline plan of performing a precursor uncrewed landing mission prior to risking any astronauts to the Moon. This contribution to the program is above and beyond the over $1B of corporate contribution cited in our Option A proposal that funds items such as our privately developed BE-7 lunar lander engine and indefinite storage of liquid hydrogen in space. All of these contributions are in addition to the $2B waiver of payments referenced above.
- Finally, Blue Origin will accept a firm, fixed-priced contract for this work, cover any system development cost overruns, and shield NASA from partner cost escalation concerns.
I believe this mission is important. I am honored to offer these contributions and am grateful to be in a financial position to be able to do so. NASA veered from its original dual-source acquisition strategy due to perceived near-term budgetary issues, and this offer removes that obstacle.
If NASA has different ideas about what would best facilitate getting back to true competition now, we are ready and willing to discuss them.
We have seen that there is strong, bi-partisan Congressional support for a second lander and for the Artemis Program in general. Along with that support, we believe this offer provides a strong foundation, both technically and fiscally, for the return of Americans to the Moon – this time to stay.
The National Team stands ready. All NASA needs to do is take advantage of this offer and amend the Appendix H contract we hold today.
Sincerely and with great respect,
Jeff Bezos
Founder
Blue Origin
27 responses to “Bezos Offers to Cover Up to $2 Billion in Costs if NASA Awards Human Landing System Contract to National Team”
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200+ suppliers in 47 states. That’s your problem right there.
Dude really wants it.
But can they deliver?
Definitely written for Congress.
Interesting
I’m going to fall in line with the Starship trooper camp on this one. I’m not so sure Congress really wants to fly on this one. If folks were really serious about going to the Moon and living there, the losers of the landing systems could start bidding out work for habitats, vehicles, life support, EVA suits, food growing facilities, sewage treatment systems etc. Heck using systems as a metric, nobody is really looking to go to the moon to stay. So far the operational side such as it is, is setting up for the stunt aspect. Think about it, nobody is showing a EVA suit, and we’re still talking about going back within 28 odd months……No. We’re not ready, and I don’t think many people are really very serious about going back for real. Even if we go with Starship, We’ll land, stay on the vehicle and come right back having never left the lander. All these return to the moon options are half baked.
the jockying right now is for the money that the government has…the reality is that there is no way that we go back to the moon by 24 either with STarship the national team or whoever…but what all the folks want is the federal contract to build…in hopes that the Gateway is finished by 2027 and someone wants to go “to the surface” after that…but otherwise there is nothing serious going on. they are likely to try piecing together the gateway
Going to the Moon and living there is cray-cray for all the reasons. No one has even committed to a semi-permanent outpost.
I think NASA is working on a space suit. I have no sources. Oh, here’s a CNN story from last month. The photo is from 2019. It captures a moment of high spirits shared between a spacesuit model and a future Viasat board member.
https://uploads.disquscdn.c…
Hey, the clock has almost run out on that GAO protest.
SpaceX is going to get that Super Heavy launch license any day now or any month now or any year now. What’s the worst that they can say? That SpaceX has to move all the turtle nests, as they appear, without freaking out the turtles, and maybe they have to shift South Padre Island and the Port of Isabel a few miles northward? Piece of cake. Paperwork.
The 2024 date is a bit of political theater. Only our former Vice President could have possibly believed it for a moment, and only because the pace of space was not something with which he was particularly familiar. Who pays attention to that stuff? That crafty Jim Bridenstine pulled a fast one. But it got put out there, and now it’s a torch carried like an article of faith by some people in Congress, but not others. But like most articles of faith carried like torches by politicians, it isn’t a real thing. Not really. It’s just a bit of window dressing.
But we’ve got these CLIPS missions percolating along. Gizmos and doodads to land on the Moon and fall into the craters of eternal darkness, there to be eaten by grews. Something will come of that. There’s a long list of sacrificial rovers and such already lined up. The Europeans want a village. Rides to the Moon for Artemis Accordians are soft power plays. Bill the State Department. Don’t be so gloomy.
I thought Jeff wrote a nice letter and now his HLS bid has gone from dead to mostly dead.
NASA has been throwing these suits around for decades. How real are they? I have yet to see anyone say, “Here’s THE suit you’ll see take the next big step.”. Perhaps all those decades of research have truly closed all the real world risk out of many designs, but I’m doubtful. It took 5 years to take Space X’s flight suit from fashion show to first flight. I’m not saying they needed all those years, but is a suit really 30 odd months from real world use? Stay tuned.
Well, 3 1/2 years might be tight (I don’t know), but I remember one vendor trotting out its moonsuit prototype two or three years ago that they said was pretty much ready to go. It was definitely a show for Congress’s consumption, but they are an experienced spacesuit maker.
More recently (back in April), NASA put out a Request For Information to industry in which they asked companies to submit moonsuit proposals for NASA’s new plan to buy “spacewalks as a service” or some such. Basically, they want to do a spacesuit version of COTS and crewed launches. Meanwhile, they’ll continue their in-house spacesuit and moonsuit programs xEMU.
The press release can be read here:
https://www.nasa.gov/featur…
Interesting point. Also, the same could be said about SpaceX’s Mars ambitions.
Basically, almost everyone wants to do launch. Considering how perhaps the most prominent guy that didn’t concentrate on launch (Bigelow) got burned by…lack of suitable launch services, it’s understandable.
But yeah, ideally most entrepreneurs, government and industry would pivot to infrastructure and let the transporters transport. We clearly don’t need Marshall to design rockets anymore, but we don’t need every space entrepreneur to make another rocket either.
Like you say, large scale closed (or more likely, almost closed) loop life support systems that can operate indefinitely will be essential. Resource extraction, radiation protection, fabrication of goods…the list goes on and on
Well I think the whole situation can be summed up by two phrases:
“You need to learn to walk, before you can run”
and
“Build it and they will come”
It can be really frustrating to see that everybody seems to be focused on launch while almost nobody is taking care of all the rest that is needed.
But, we really do need launch to be “solved”. With Falcon 9 SpaceX showed what can be achieved with great engineering instead of waiting for any “exotic” new materials, technologies or even physics breakthroughs.
But this isn’t enough, we really need something on the scale and cost of what Starship promises before we can actually expect any “next giant leap” to happen.
There are many people with great ideas for a business case in space (beyond communications and earth observation, booth already booming markets thanks to satellite miniaturization and “cheap enough” launch costs), but nobody will fund them unless access to space will be much more routine and cheaper then it is today.
Yes, and progress is being made in other areas. PETA’s pursuit of lab produced meat, part of a field of study known as molecular agriculture, for its own agenda has really done more to advance the technology of space settlement than the various space advocate groups.
Similarly the military funding of remotely constructed structures using telebotic systems, also ignored by space advocates, is advancing the capability to build habitats on the Moon and Mars. The presentations they make at civil engineering conferences of structures built with the technology are impressive, as are the ones on robotic mining systems.
In short, the other technologies are emerging but because space advocates are so focused on launch they are not seeing the progress, progress driven by Earth based needs, but with future applications to space.
Sadly they are still focused on Dr. O’Neill’s decades old space settlements ideas with rabbit ranching and gold fish farms than on the real technology that will be used to build 1G communities on the Moon, Mars, Asteroids and open space. The entrepreneur that starts pulling that technology together will become the Microsoft of space settlement.
I don’t think you want farming, life support, and habitat building to be ‘owned’ by a “Microsoft”. I’m sure the dear leader of such a corporation would do a double plus good job in respecting the human rights of his customers, but just in case those technologies really need to be in the public domain and owned by the individuals who depend on them as much as possible.
Good luck as nobody is going to invest in a technology they are not allowed to own. And NASA has never seen space settlements as anything more than eye candy to keep the advocates happy so they keep lobbying for NASA. Just look at how NASA simply ignored the old Space Settlement Act.
Nope, like anything else that is important, if it gets down it will be done by entrepreneurs, just they are now doing the job of lowering launch costs, one NASA been failing at for decades and decades.
Yes, low cost reliable launch is only the first step to space settlement, then comes the real challenge of learning to live sustainability in space so the only thing you need to launch are the emigrants to the space communities.
As a side note, Elon Musk’s brother Kimbal Musk is a CEO of a firm that is a leader in the field of Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), a critical technology for space settlement. His firm is quietly disrupting the organic farming industry, but since it’s not “space” few space advocates follow it.
Yes. If one looks at Tubbiolo’s laundry list of non-launch must-haves, one finds that SpaceX and/or Musk have connections/enterprises that can very plausibly be considered the front-runners when it comes to supplying all of that stuff and more besides. The worst crime of Congress and NASA over the last 40 years is turning the U.S. space industry into a bunch of baby ducks who only know how to follow “Mama” around and fear getting too far away from her.
He’s not going anywhere unless they sort out BE-4.
https://twitter.com/SciGuyS…
https://twitter.com/DELTA_V…
One guy replied, “I guess not going to space is hard”, 😀
That’s certainly not a “hardware rich” development process. SpaceX is literally building an order of magnitude more Raptor engines as part of its development process.
Yep, SpaceX just celebrated the 100th Raptor built in Hawthorne. Meanwhile a factory designed to mass produce Raptors is under construction in McGregor Texas. The Raptor may well become the Liberty Engine of spaceflight.
yeap the next story about BO is going to be ULA walking away from the engine
If they had any alternatives they probably would have done so already.
yeah but I bet they are looking at it. its unlikely Vulcan flies until 22
Tory has already said that. The question now is when in 2022?
Yes. Walking away without having someplace else to walk to may make you feel better for a short while, but it doesn’t really solve your problem. I’d be more inclined to think Tory would insist on being given management control of the BE-4 project instead of walking away.
When I am involved in a bidding process to supply something to my company and one of the suppliers say me, once I awarded the contract to another bidder, that they can reduce his price in such big quantity, I get angry becaue I feel like they wanted to scam me with his initial bid.
yeap
Anger mixed with a certain amount of relief, one hopes. Dodging bullets is no fun, but it’s more fun than being hit.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
cue music
with no offense to Jeff Bezos, is this how you get dates these days?
I get it, you are rich…2 billion dollars is about like m and 100 dollars (ask my wife) but…
the more I think about this the more I kind of think this is Bezos looking out over his space “empire”…and seeing no real viable hardware (except a sub orbital rocket) and thinking “I am a major space player because I can spend money”
In the end Bezos is no where with BE 4, nowhere with New Glenn and its hard to see that he is anywhere but viewgraphs with this proposal
if he wants to be somewhere it will probably take 2 billion or so a year for 5 or so years to get JUST THIS PROJECT to some sort of hardware. and probably another 2 billion or so to get BE4 of the ground with Vulcan…and he needs to get that part (the engine) done or the next big story about BO is going to be ULA walking away in a lot of anger from BE4
in other words, its unclear to me that even spending 2 billion dollars…he gets progress going on either this or BE4…much less New Glenn
there has been some discussion here about “everyone concentrating on the launch equation”…but the reason for that is that until that gets in hand…there is no reason to concentrate on anything else.
and until Jeff gets BE4 flying on Vulcan..the real story is that every day his and BO’s credibility is going to sink in the aerospace industry as well as with his “customers”
and I say that as a former Big BO fan