The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its report why it supported NASA's decision to go ahead with one company for initial lunar landings.
Direct link (PDF, 76 pages).
It has much more information that was previously redacted.
It has some real gems in it.
SpaceX’s concept of operations contemplated sixteen total launches, consisting of: 1 launch of its [DELETED]; 14 launches of its Tanker Starships to supply fuel to [DELETED]; and 1 launch of its HLS Lander Starship, which would be [DELETED] and then travel to the Moon.
What could [DELETED] possibly be? Well, it's obvious. It has already become a meme synonym to "depot":
One,
two
DELETED = DEpot for Low Earth Transport and Earth Departure.
This is likely politically motivated. A certain influential senator
really hates the idea of fuel depots because they would make his pet project (SLS) unnecessary.
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
GAO teaching Dynetics elementary rocketry. Their proposal was too heavy to fly, NASA counted that as "significant weakness" and Dynetics objected.
We also know the full prices now:
$2,941,394,557 SpaceX
$5,995,463,651 Blue Origin/National Team
$9,082,209,433 Dynetics
Unfortunately the proposed payments for 2021 were redacted, but all three individually exceeded the total money NASA had available before SpaceX adjusted the milestones to keep the 2021 payments below NASA's budget.
We learn which requirement NASA waived for SpaceX on page 8. The original requirements were a flight readiness review (FRR) for "every HLS element". That would have meant a FRR for every refueling flight of SpaceX (it needs multiple of them), which looks excessive as they are just repetitions of the same flight profile. SpaceX wants to launch fueling missions 12 days apart, so they would do these reviews essentially non-stop. NASA waived that requirement (FRR between flights only if something unexpected happens), Blue Origin and Dynetics claimed it would give them a competitive disadvantage, GAO dismissed that. Blue Origin doesn't have equivalent launches and the impact on Dynetics' operations would be minimal - not enough to become a competitive proposal.
One of Blue Origin's "outside technical consultants" in the protest turned out to work for Blue Origin, and another worked on other competitive projects (page 16).
the protesters allege that a single award to SpaceX will result in a de facto sole-source award for NASA’s Option B requirements and, perhaps, NASA’s subsequent HLS requirements [...] such arguments are a legally deficient mix of (i) patently untimely challenges to the terms of the HLS BAA and Option A BAA, and (ii) premature challenges to future procurement actions.
- If Blue Origin and Dynetics think the past competition had illegal rules they should have complained earlier instead of submitting a bid
- You can't file a protest speculating that future competition rules might be illegal
A previous complaint by Blue Origin (when they lost to ULA and SpaceX), using essentially the same arguments, was dismissed for the same reasons. GAO used Blue Origin's own protest as precedent to rule against Blue Origin again (pages 22-26).
There are many "NASA said they wanted to do X" -> "actually, NASA said something else repeatedly, here are literal quotes" in the report.
"it violates the rules of a
FAR 15 procurement" -> "irrelevant, it was not a FAR 15 procurement" is a very common theme, too.Part III (starting page 32) discusses individual claims concerning the different proposals. It's pretty damning. Some examples:
Orion uses a 3-IMU architecture while the HLS will use a [DELETED] architecture. Id. To address potential dilemma situations arising with [DELETED], Blue Origin proposed to utilize [DELETED] to [DELETED]. Id. at 24167. Blue Origin’s proposal represented that “[t]hese [DELETED] . . . will be developed and fly on Orion before being leveraged for HLS.”
IMU=inertial measurement unit, telling the spacecraft where it is and in which direction it points. With three of them you can easily identify a faulty unit and use the result of the other two. Presumably Blue Origin wants to use only two (a single one wouldn't have a chance), and utilize "[DELETED] to [DELETED]", whatever that is. Blue Origin also provided conflicting claims whether this has been tested or not, how it will be tested in flight, and generally didn't provide a clear plan for development. NASA called it a weakness. Blue Origin complained.
NASA provided example landing spots together with the general expectation that it wants to land in a place that doesn't have the Sun high in the sky. Blue Origin's landing system relies on the Sun, and Blue Origin found that the example landing scenarios would be "challenging" to "infeasible". NASA called it a weakness (surprise!). Blue Origin claims it didn't know about the light requirements.
Stated simply, we find nothing unreasonable in the agency concluding that SpaceX’s recognition of the risk and proposal of specific mitigation to remedy the risk warranted a lesser risk rating than Blue Origin’s proposal, which failed to address the issue other than to note that Blue Origin would attempt to address the issue at a later date
Apparently people at Dynetics overlooked the requirement to put everything into the submitted proposal. As a result tons of technical details are missing - Dynetics assumed NASA would include previous studies on its own (despite writing explicitly that they won't do that). That's coming from a company requesting $9 billion in funding!
We don't get access to the proposals but they are apparently the length of multiple books. With the level of detail varying a lot between proposals:
SpaceX’s ISPA [Integrated Systems Performance Analysis] included a several hundred page “Propulsion System and
Performance Analysis”
[..]
the propulsion analysis incorporated as a subsection a nearly 50-page “Propellant Heat Rates” analysis addressing boil-off
On this record, we cannot conclude that NASA erred in finding that SpaceX’s detailed proposal focus on boil-off warranted the same assessed risk as Dynetics’s brief, conclusory and “to be determined” discussion in its proposal
