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Bezos Offers To Personally Pay NASA $2 Billion For Launch Privileges 

   DailyWire.com
FILE: Jeff Bezos, founder and chief executive officer of Amazon.com Inc., listens during an Economic Club of Washington discussion in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Sept. 13, 2018. Amazon.com Inc. founder Jeff Bezos, the worlds richest person, and his wife MacKenzie are divorcing after 25 years. Bezos, 54, is worth $137 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, a ranking of the worlds 500 wealthiest people. The couple met when they both worked at hedge fund D.E. Shaw, and they married in 1993. He founded Amazon a year later. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Jeff Bezos offered to close NASA’s $2 billion Human Landing System budget shortfall if Blue Origin is permitted to help with the Artemis lunar program.

In April, NASA chose SpaceX as the sole recipient of a $2.89 billion contract to develop a crewed vessel that will carry astronauts to the surface of the moon. Bezos told NASA administrator Bill Nelson that his agency ought to embrace a spirit of competition by affording an opportunity to the flight system created by Blue Origin’s National Team.

Bezos’ letter to Nelson explains:

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.

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 exchange for the opportunity, Blue Origin offered to “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.” The letter stresses that the offer is “not a deferral, but is an outright and permanent waiver of those payments” to provide “time for government appropriation actions to catch up.”

Bezos also wrote that Blue Origin would, at its own cost, “contribute the development and launch of a pathfinder mission to low-Earth orbit of the lunar descent element,” as well as “cover any system development cost overruns” and “shield NASA from partner cost escalation concerns.”

“I believe this mission is important,” continued Bezos. “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.”

Earlier in July, Bezos and three other passengers completed a successful Blue Origin mission to space. After soaring to an apogee of 66.5 miles, the capsule touched down safely in the Texas desert after the system’s booster landed itself on a launchpad.

Days later, Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) proposed a tax on private space travel, citing environmental concerns.

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