Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin NASA Lawsuit Keeps Crashing DOJ Computers

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin NASA lawsuit against the contract of SpaceX and the lunar lander project keeps crashing computers of the Department of Justice (shortly known as DOJ) due to the hefty file size of documents.

Amazon former CEO Jeff Bezos announced the new Climate Pledge, with the goal of reaching the Paris climate accord goals 10 years early. Amazon will become the first signatory of the pledge. Thus, the more than seven gigabytes file size of the lawsuit gave DOJ a hard time converting it into a PDF file. It turns out that Adobe Acrobat ends up crashing as the DOJ attempted converting seven hundred files in a single shot.

A space reporter on Twitter revealed that the issue with the PDF conversion is will delay the SpaceX Human Landing System (HLS) contract for at least a week. The reporter further shared a screenshot of the document from the DOJ in the tweet, saying that the agency has “tried several different ways to create 50-megabyte files for more efficient filing.” However, doing so still crashed the Acrobat software. The document also noted that the lawsuit “contains resource-intensive graphics and layouts,” citing it as one of the issues that have ballooned its file size into more than seven gigabytes.

The new hurdle was supposed to further push back the SpaceX Human Landing System or HLS contract to a much farther date. The delay was supposed to move the SpaceX and NASA contract to Nov. 8 from the initial Nov. 1. As such, DOJ lawyers went to ask the court to submit the documents via a DVD instead of converting them into PDFs. Thankfully, the judge of the case has granted the request of the DOJ lawyers to use DVDs to file the documents of the case from Aug. 27 to Sept. 3. As such, the decision has allowed the contract to stay on track.

The document from the DOJ also noted that the staff of NASA that was supposed to fix the crashing and hanging issue of Acrobat were unavailable as they were at the 36th Annual Space Symposium during the incident. With that, the DOJ lawyers were compelled to find a solution elsewhere–leading to the use of DVDs.

Recently Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin vs. NASA, SpaceX Contract Blue Origin sued NASA last Aug. 19 for its $2.9 billion lunar landing contract with SpaceX. It comes after Bezos offered to pay for the cost of the contract for the space agency to reconsider them for the moon landing project instead of its close rival SpaceX. It is not the first time that Bezos’ expressed his disapproval of the decision. Blue Origin first protested the SpaceX and NASA deal last April 26 in a very lengthy 175-page document. However, the Government Accountability Office or GAO dismissed the claims of Blue Origin and allowed the contract to continue as is. Thus, Blue Origin brought NASA to the federal court.