Have you read the Source Selection Statement? Blue Origin's team proposal was four times more expensive than the HLS budget, and then they changed it to the two times the budget, and asked advance payments... Propulsion testing overlapped landing time frame. Dynetics Team had negative mass margins in their proposal(!). Did any of the contenders outside SpaceX even read the requirements document?
Thanks for the link! Interesting reading (24 pages). My highlights:
There were a lot of good (and some bad relating to complexity) things about the SpaceX proposal, but this document was most excited about SpaceX being committed to using Starship for other commercial endeavors. Indeed, SpaceX essentially gave NASA a 50% price break due to SpaceX's anticipated commercial revenue.
Within Management Area of Focus 4, Commercial Approach, I found SpaceX’s significant strength for its comprehensive plan to leverage its HLS contract performance to advance a multi-faceted approach to commercializing its underlying Starship capability to be a highlight of its management proposal. SpaceX’s plans to self-fund and assume financial risk for over half of the development and test activities as an investment in its architecture, which it plans to utilize for numerous commercial applications, presents outstanding benefits to NASA.
The very first sentence about Blue Origin had this
As an initial matter, I note that the SEP did not identify any significant strengths within Blue Origin’s technical proposal.
In addition to stating that they thought Blue Origin's engine design exceeded the company's likely ability to design it, they had this one liner which I read as an actual engineering mistake?
four of its six proposed communications links, including critical links such as that between HLS and Orion, as well as Direct-to-Earth communications, will not close as currently designed.
This knock was interesting. I am guessing that Blue Origin proposed cryogenic Hydrogen, instead of SpaceX's methane? Hydrogen is much trickier to keep liquid (33K) versus Methane (about 100K) not to mention how hard it is to handle.
Blue Origin’s choice of cryogenic propellant for the majority of its mission needs will require the use of several critical advanced CFM technologies that are both low in maturity and have not been demonstrated in space.
They also didn't like BO's complex descent and ascent operations which required human EVAs to do things external to the craft. Sounds like the "clever" engineers thought they'd save on mass by having the humans do some work, but NASA didn't like the risks associated with this.
And, wow, BO's proposal didn't give the government full data rights. Go figure that a Bezos led company would want to keep some data to itself
Blue’s proposal further impugns the Government’s potential rights in data by proposing to deliver data created in conjunction with NASA with less than a GPR license; this is prohibited by the solicitation.
I though this was interesting. Congress shot themselves in the foot if they wanted to parcel out contracts to many people. Basically, the HLS funding was too low to award a contract to more than one company:
given NASA’s current and projected HLS budgets, it is my assessment that such negotiations with Blue Origin, if opened, would not be in good faith. After accounting for a contract award to SpaceX, the amount of remaining available funding is so insubstantial that, in my opinion, NASA cannot reasonably ask Blue Origin to lower its price for the scope of work it has proposed to a figure that would potentially enable NASA to afford making a contract award to Blue Origin.
As for Dynetics, the significant technical issue is that the design is currently too heavy for the engine/vehicle capability. This ... is pretty bad. They basically proposed a design that right from the outset won't work.
While Dynetics recognizes and has been actively addressing this issue during its base period performance, its proposal does not provide sufficient details regarding its plan for executing on and achieving significant mass opportunities, especially when in the same breath, the proposal also identifies material additional mass threats.
There were many other issues highlighted with the Dynetics proposal, which to me made it looked like they did a slapdash effort, or with a C team of engineers. BTW, note that NASA gave the teams all of 22 days to respond to the RFP, so if you hadn't done serious work throughout 2020, you were hosed.
BTW, the issue NASA had with SpaceX's complexity had to do with its earth orbit refueling. SpaceX is proposing to launch the moon lander, stick it in earth orbit and then have multiple more Starships dock with it over time to fully refuel it. While NASA didn't like all the moving parts, they tempered this with the fact that all this complexity occurs in earth orbit, where it is much easier to fix things if adjustments need to be made. And also, all this can be done months ahead of the humans being launched, so SpaceX can pre-position a fully fueled Starship around lunar orbit, and even give NASA a 100 day window to get their astronauts there.
www.nasa.gov
