High school all over again. Lawfare at its finest. ..... Meanwhile the Chinese are laughing as the continental US falls further behind in the space race. Akuma
I'm a contractor for the government. This sh*t is standard operating procedure. Gov awards a contract to company A. Company B and C protest, Gov halts contract, reviews, and most likely, decides to continue to award to company A. In the thread title, I thought "Stunning Reversal" meant the Gov backed out of the contract, but not yet. If it does eventually back out that will be "stunning".
%% Exactly; + that may work out that way. They're in so many lawsuits with states/maybe a better downtrend that we figured /LOL
wtf https://theintercept.com/2021/05/25/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-senate-bailout/ SENATE PREPARING $10 BILLION BAILOUT FUND FOR JEFF BEZOS SPACE FIRM Bezos’s Blue Origin lost its bid for a major NASA contract to Elon Musk, but the Senate is ordering the agency to give a second one now. NOW THAT Jeff Bezos’s space flight company Blue Origin has lost a multibillion contract to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, Congress is prepping the ground for Bezos to win a contract anyway, ordering NASA to make not one but two awards. The order would come through the Endless Frontier Act, a bill to beef up resources for science and technology research that’s being debated on the Senate floor this week. An amendment was added to that legislation by Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., to hand over $10 billion to NASA — money that most likely would go to Blue Origin, a company that’s headquartered in Cantwell’s home state. Cantwell’s amendment is no sure bet though: Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., introduced a last-minute amendment Monday to eliminate the $10 billion. “It does not make a lot of sense to me that we would provide billions of dollars to a company owned by the wealthiest guy in America,” Sanders told The Intercept Tuesday. Cantwell’s measure wouldn’t rescind the grant to SpaceX but would create an additional contract that Bezos’s company would be in line to win. A third company, Dynetics, had also bid for the moonshot, but the author of the new amendment offers a strong suggestion of which company it’s likely to benefit. “I think there needs to be redundancy,” or multiple contractors in case one fails, she told Nelson at his confirmation hearing. “And it has to be clear this process can’t be redundancy later. It has to be redundancy now.” The bill is currently on the Senate floor and has broad bipartisan support. A procedural vote last week passed by a 71-27 margin, and Senate Democratic leaders are eyeing a Thursday vote for final passage, after which it would need to move through the House of Representatives. Blue Origin spent $625,000 lobbying the Senate in the first three months of 2021, according to lobbying disclosure records. Among that spending was $50,000 to a team of lobbyists at a firm called Clark Hill that would specifically focus on the moon landing program.