America's next trip on the moon could be delayed a bit due to...PDFs?
A U.S. federal court granted the Department of Justice a week-long extension to its lawsuit against Jeff Bezos's space company Blue Origin. Why? Large PDF files .
Amazon founder Elon Musk's SpaceX sued the U.S. government for a $2.9 billion contract NASA gave to his competitor. The suit also names SpaceX.
Blue Origin claims that there are "fundamental problems" with NASA's decision. Blue Origin also claimed that NASA was supposed to award multiple awards.
The delay was caused by PDF problems. Adobe created PDFs, a proprietary file format that is used primarily to store documents. The U.S. Department of Justice attorneys claim that there have been many issues with the PDF format.
According to the DOJ there are more than 7 GB data related to this case. The online system of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims allows files up to 50MB to be uploaded. All of this amounts to "several hundreds" PDFs. This includes other file formats that could be converted into PDFs.
According to the DOJ, it tried to convert multiple documents into PDF batches. However, larger files could lead to the upload system being unable to function properly. The DOJ stated that it had tried many different methods to create files of 50 megabytes for faster filing. None of them worked.
Instead of using an online file system, documents will be transferred to DVDs by the U.S. government.
Blue Origin and SpaceX both agreed to the extension. NASA's contact to SpaceX is currently suspended until November 1st due to the lawsuit. This latest development could extend it for an additional week.
A lawsuit and a bunch of PDF files have put space exploration on hold.
