NASA just bought the rest of the space station crew flights from SpaceX | Hacker News Reader

NASA just bought the rest of the space station crew flights from SpaceX

arstechnica.com

56 pointsmartincmartin21 comments

It just makes sense. SpaceX is far, far ahead of Boing. And one thing that is really driving that is that the Atlas 5 is sold out.

Further Starliner flights would require human rating of the Vulcan vehicle. ULA does not want to pay for that. Boeing doesn't want to pay that unless they know they have a steady stream of Starliner missions and that is not a sure thing.

NASA's press release:

https://blogs.nasa.gov/kennedy/2022/06/01/nasa-to-purchase-a...

So when can we expect the lawsuit to be filed?

Not sure it’d be a lawsuit per se; more of a inspector general review and or & government accountability protest review:

https://www.gao.gov/legal/bid-protests/faqs

Whose?

I believe Bezos/Blue Origin have a reputation for suing every time SpaceX wins a contract from NASA.

It's almost expected any time there is a large award with competitive bids. Losing bidders will sue, because they have deep enough pockets and legal staff to do it, just on the chance that the award will be blocked. It's part of the reason that large government procurements are so inefficient.

When Atlanta's transit system wanted to switch from an old token based system that was obsolete and unrepairable to smartcard system like most transit systems use, they hired consultants to ensure that there were no flaws in the way they bid out the new system. Even with that, the company with the losing bid filed a lawsuit. That company ended up losing the lawsuit but the people of Atlanta were stuck using the broken token system for an extra year or two while the case bumped around the court system. The damage wasn't just the cost of the consultants to try to prevent this and then for the legal staff to defend the transit authority, but also the public lost out by being forced to continue using an obsolete system. It's very frustrating but perhaps an unavoidable artifact of our legal system.

It’s not unavoidable. They should simply pay the bills AND the losses of the winning side. It’s the same as false accusation to someone, you ought to pay for all damages you might have incurred.

As an Atlanta native, the token was better... fwiw.

It mystifies me. Blue Origin doesn’t have an orbit-capable booster, nor a crew capsule that can mate with ISS or stay docked for six+ months. They have New Shepard, which is essentially a very large amusement park ride. I would like to ride it one day. It doesn’t come close to meeting the requirements for an ISS contract.

Blue Origin also does not get handed free money by NASA and FCC.

Which is not to say they should get free money. Rather, I should.

well blue origin wasn't bidding on ISS contracts, they were bidding on a lunar landing... graditim ferociter?

Still don’t think New Shepard has enough ΔV to pull that off, haha!

IIRC, BO's HLS bid gave a few options for different launch vehicles that the lander could use, but none of them were New Shepard

And SpaceX sues when ULA gets a contract. Using lawsuits, you could probably construct a pretty clear DAG organizing the industry from the most incumbent company to the newest challenger

SpaceX has not sued ULA ever unless I am missing something.

SpaceX did sue the Airforce at one point because the Airforce basically tried to award something like 10 years of contracts to a single supplier.

That is quite a different thing.

Although I didn't actually say that SpaceX has sued ULA, they have sued both of ULA's parent companies over the EELV contract circa 2005, as well multiple lawsuits against the government over bids they lost in 2014 (EELV block buy) and 2019. They also filed multiple protests in 2019 against NASA over the Lucy contract, but dropped them all when they got awarded DART. Another time, they even sued a NASA consultant because they believed he was allegedly talking mad shit about a rumored F-9 anomaly

And SpaceX won those because they actually broke the monopoly that was against federal law.

The lawsuits by BlueOrigin were after actually competitive bids had already happened.

That is why people didn't mind the SpaceX lawsuits and why they won.

Nothing SpaceX has ever done compares to BlueOrigin offensive after the moon contract.

That's because ULA is doing 1/2 the work for 2x the cost.

I'm not sure where that reputation came from given that they've only done it twice.

Also Blue Origin has no vehicle capable so would have no standing. You can't sue for something you're not a potential party to.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com