This article is misleading for several reasons. Firstly, referring to it as Jeff Bezos’s space firm is not entirely true since Blue Origin is mostly detached from Bezos compared to Elon Musk and SpaceX.
Secondly, this funding isn’t a bailout and that’s just downright false to call it so. It’s a boost in funding to NASA for Artemis to secure a second lunar lander for the human landing system as well as other things in fact only $5.4 billion is for the HLS.
SpaceX was the only company funded in the competition as NASA was given a measly budget to do so leaving SpaceX to drop their bid and take on more of a financial burden just so NASA had an option. However, congress wasn’t happy with only one company being selected and that one company being SpaceX annoyed congress. In fact it’s likely NASA selected SpaceX in part to force congress to give them adequate funding.
So Why do we need a second lander? For Redundancy. If something happened to Lunar Starship that rendered it unable to be used then NASA needs a second option to land/return its astronauts and considering the only other option was a lander than had a negative upmass (would have needed to shed weight to reach orbit again and couldn’t carry any samples to gateway) the National Teams lander was simply the best option.Who’s the National team you ask? It’s Blue Origin, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and Draper who are developing the lander. So it’s not even just Blue Origin!!!
Now you may be wondering why Jeff Bezos can’t fund it himself. But I would say why should he? It’s a lander for the government that they simply wouldn’t be able to make a profit from and is for multiple companies than just Blue Origin. There aren’t many companies other than SpaceX that would take on a financial risk and remove profitability from a lander for NASA to use so it only makes sense for NASA to fund it.
But even then this is a tiny amount of money when put into perspective with other government spending. The entire bill is just 1/3 of how much the government will spend on the F35 program (assuming it lasts 70 years) EVERY YEAR!!!. And this bill is for 5 years of funding.
Last year the military received $778 billion in funding. NASA received just $24 billion and with that money NASA lands rovers on the surface of Mars and launches advanced earth observation satellites such as sentinel 6 in order to monitor climate change, predict droughts, enable farmers with data to allow them to get better yields, monitor sea level rise and much much more. Not to mention the medical and technological developments being done on the ISS which has been enabled by commercial Spaceflight through the CRS and CCP programs.
So again calling it a bailout to Jeff Bezos’s space firm is downright false and puts a bad light on commercial Spaceflight where it simply isn’t warranted as well as showing a complete lack of research and understanding of the bill itself.