NASA has chosen SpaceX to go to the Moon

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) officially rejected the protests from Dynetics and Blue Origin, confirming NASA's choice for the winner of the HLS program. The US Space Agency had awarded the contract for the construction of the lunar lander of the Artemis missions to SpaceX alone. The other two companies to submit a proposal, Blue Origin and Dynetics, however, had filed an official protest. The GAO, an office responsible for the proper allocation of federal funds, had therefore opened an investigation to check the correct award of the contract. Now, a few days ahead of the official August 4 deadline, the GAO has concluded its analysis. The federal office confirmed that NASA did not violate any term of the agreement by choosing only SpaceX. It is fair to note right away that the GAO did not have the power (and the task) to change NASA's choice, only to control the choice of the American Space Agency. The protests of Blue Origin and Dynetics were essentially based on two aspects. The first was the choice of a single proposal, and this according to the two companies would have violated the terms of the contract, which set itself the goal of maintaining competitiveness on the market. The GAO said, however, that NASA largely had the power and the right to choose the number of proposals it deemed necessary, and that the amount of government funding would be a major factor in the number of proposals chosen. There were few funds and therefore only one proposal was consistently chosen. The second criticism was based on the fact that NASA did not consider a critical aspect of the SpaceX proposal. The GAO found this criticism unsustainable as the protesters could not establish that this discrepancy was used as a bias in the choice.

The contract for the HLS (Human Landing System) program is then confirmed to SpaceX. The company will receive a grant of $ 2941394557 for the construction of a modified version of Starship. This will be used to make the journey between the lunar orbit and the surface starting from the Artemis 3 mission.

NASA's choice was based on three main factors: Technology (technical aspects); The price; Management aspects. These three factors are in descending order of importance. However, the US Agency has explicitly stressed that factor 1 and factor 3 combined are much more important than factor 2. SpaceX, in addition to having presented the most technically valid and sustainable proposal, also presented the one with the lowest price. The response of Blue Origin was not long in coming, which in a press release states that it remains convinced of the need for two to finance two different proposals. Blue Origin also says they will continue to take action to persuade congress to increase funding for the lunar program and then fund two different proposals.