E-MAIL THIS LINK
To: 

Maria Cantwell Uses Anti-China Plan to Possibly Steer $10 Billion Moon Landing Contract to Bezos-Owned Space Company in Her State
[BREITBART] Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA), the powerful chairwoman of the Senate Commerce Committee, plans to attempt to use a bipartisan piece of legislation meant to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s technological advances to instead steer what could end up being a huge boon of a federal contract worth billions of dollars to a company operating in her home state owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos.

Cantwell, the chair of the panel that will consider the supposedly anti-China bill on Wednesday, is proposing amendment language to the plan that would authorize a second contract from NASA for a key part of the Artemis program that aims to put Americans back on the moon soon. NASA, through the Artemis program, awarded a contract last month for what is called a Human Landing System (HLS) to billionaire Elon Musk’s SpaceX company, a direct competitor of Bezos’s Blue Origin company.

Both Musk’s and Bezos’s companies competed for the HLS contract in the Artemis program, as did another firm called Dynetics. SpaceX won the deal, NASA announced on April 16, in a hyped-up blurb that was headlined: "As Artemis Moves Forward, NASA Picks SpaceX to Land Next Americans on Moon."

"SpaceX’s HLS Starship, designed to land on the Moon, leans on the company’s tested Raptor engines and flight heritage of the Falcon and Dragon vehicles," NASA’s blurb stated. "Starship includes a spacious cabin and two airlocks for astronaut moonwalks. The Starship architecture is intended to evolve to a fully reusable launch and landing system designed for travel to the Moon, Mars, and other destinations."

The contract with SpaceX is worth $2.89 billion and is for Musk’s company to develop what is called the Human Landing System to land American astronauts on the moon for the first time in decades. In addition to the blurb announcing that SpaceX won the deal, NASA released a video further explaining how Blue Origin and Dynetics had also been competing for the contract but that SpaceX won it in the end:
Posted by: Fred 2021-05-13
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=601684