The race to surpass the rivals and other contemporaries in accessing space are getting faster and more competitive by the day. There are multiple agencies now that are working tirelessly to send more machines into the space and get most of the information from there.
Moreover, a recent goal to send humans on the moon once again has created a frenzy among space organizations. NASA has given the Human Landing System (HLS) to SpaceX and this development has fueled this race further. The rivals of SpaceX were not very pleased with their competition being awarded the project. As a result, Blue Origin and Dynetics filed a lawsuit against NASA.
NASA has transferred the funds to SpaceX, nevertheless. The progress is going so fast that it is speculated that the goal of sending humans to the moon by 2024 will be achieved before that year. For its NextSTEP – 2 Appendix H program, NASA had decided to award the project to all three of the competitors in the field. However, with time it was observed that the budget did not allow funding all three of these companies. Hence, NASA had to choose one and it chose SpaceX.
The Government Accountability Office (GAO) had a complaint against this awarding of the project. However, on 30th July, the accusations were dismissed till they could scrutinize the protests. On the same day, NASA made the first payment to the company.
The documents of the deal were uploaded on USASpending.gov and it was stated that NASA gave US$300 million out of an obligated amount of US$439.6 million (the total contract is valued at over US$3 billion) in that payment. However, owing to the lawsuit and stop-work order, the operations were delayed and now, in order to meet the deadline, everything has to be accelerated. The contractors are also having complicated arguments of having the ideal placements of their logos on the machine.
