Blue Origin’s lawsuit against US and SpaceX delayed due to DoJ’s trouble processing PDFs

Blue Origin’s massive lawsuit, over 7 GB worth of PDF, is causing the agency’s computers to crash

Blue Origin’s New Shepard crew (L-R) Oliver Daemen, Mark Bezos, Jeff Bezos, and Wally Funk hold a press conference after flying into space (Getty Images)

NASA’s contract with SpaceX for building a moon lander, which was paused due to a lawsuit filed by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, would take an additional week to resolve because the US Department of Justice is reportedly having trouble converting case documents into PDFs.

Blue Origin’s lawsuit is reportedly too big – over 7 GB worth of Adobe Acrobat file format PDF – while in the US Court of Federal Claims for each filing, the main document and each attachment is mandated to be no more than 50 MB in size.

The massive lawsuit filed by Blue Origin is reportedly causing the agency’s computers to crash.

“We have tried several different ways to create 50-megabyte files for more efficient filing, all without success thus far,” says the copy of DOJ’s document shared on Twitter by space reporter Joey Roullete.

“The administrative record in this case is extraordinarily voluminous, consisting of hundreds of individual documents and over seven gigabytes of data,” attorneys from the Department of Justice reportedly wrote.

Instead of using the online file system, the US government will be transferring the case documents to DVDs.

The situation was also exacerbated since the agency staff who could have fixed the issue were at the 36th Annual Space Symposium last week, Futurism reported.

Due to this delay in processing the lawsuit, NASA’s stay of SpaceX’s contract, which was initially slated for 1 November is pushed by another week to 8th.

The lawsuit filed by Blue Origin challenges Nasa’s decision to give SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to build the lunar lander that will take humanity back to the Moon for the first time in decades.

In the lawsuit, the Jeff Bezos-founded company “challenges NASA’s unlawful and improper evaluation of proposals,” arguing that the process should be re-run.

Bezos also wrote an open letter to Nasa administrator Bill Nelson last month, offering to waive payments of up to $2 billion if the contract was awarded to Blue Origin.

In the letter, the billionaire said the decision could make up for Nasa’s funding shortfalls and also allow Blue Origin to compete with SpaceX.

The repeated attempts by Bezos to win back the contract drew ridicule from SpaceX chief Elon Musk who tweeted: “If lobbying and lawyers could get u to orbit, Bezos would be on Pluto rn (right now).”