Jalopnik By Jason Torchinsky
NASA's Defense Of Picking SpaceX For Lunar Landing Reveals Details Of Plan And Throws Real Shade
The Government Accounting Office's response to Blue Origin's protest sheds light on the Starship launch plan and really roasts one other applicant
You know we’re planning to go back to the moon, right? We left some electric cars there, after all, and we should probably check on them. You also may recall that NASA selected SpaceX’s proposal for a lunar lander based on their in-development Starship spacecraft, and you may recall that Jeff Bezos didn’t take that so well, and issued a protest about the decision via Blue Origin, Bezos’ spacecraft company, whose lander was not selected. The third company considered, Dynetics, also protested, so the Government Accountability Office (GAO) looked into it, and issued a report. There’s interesting things in that report.
I’ve been looking through the report, and it reveals NASA’s unflinching support of the SpaceX decision. One big reason is that SpaceX’s proposal was the cheapest, at just under three billion dollars, while Blue Origin was right about double that at nearly six billion, and Dynetics half again as much at nine billion.
You might notice in that chart there that Dynetics’ offering was the only one to be listed as “marginal” when it came to the “technical” category. That’s what leads us to what may be the sickest burn in NASA/GAO history.
So, despite what I personally think is the most practical general design for a lander—low to the surface, easy entry/egress, a good sort of start for a modular base design, that kind of thing—it looks like the Dynetics entry’s mass is greater than the thrust of its engines, which, as you can probably guess, is a problem.
As the GAO report puts it (emphasis mine):
“First, Dynetics protests the agency’s assignment of a significant weakness for the proposal’s failure to reasonably substantiate the claimed mass reduction opportunities necessary to close the deficit between the mass estimate for Dynetics’s proposed integrated descent/ascent element (DAE) and the current flight dynamic mass allocation. In order to enable a rocket to lift off from a launch pad, the action or thrust of the rocket must be greater than the mass of the rocket it is lifting. See “Rocket Principles,” NASA, available at
https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/rocket/TRCRocket/ rocket_principles.html (last visited July 25, 2021).”
Do you see what NASA did there? They gave Dynetics the link for NASA’s K-12 educational portal! The page is literally titled “The Beginners Guide to Rockets!”
More:
https://jalopnik.com/nasas-defense-of-picking-spacex-for-lunar-landing-revea-1847477379
