I'm not surprised - Amazon successfully managed to get the Pentagon to drop a $10 Billion USD contract with Microsoft by "applying lawyers" to the matter [1]! Why not do the same here. When you are at the scale of ambition that Bezos et al. play in then why shouldn't you push your legal execs to deliver the same way you push your engineering execs to deliver...
That all said, personally I'm sure NASA will be better served by a SpaceX contract - the relentless iterative pace of the company always shocks me. Hopefully the GAO's assessment will stand up to the legal pressure.
How do people justify Hyperloop as a particularly green option when my initial thought would be that it uses a similar amount of energy as a normal train - which we already have as a popular option? Or is the energy cost of maintaining the vacuum & associated processes far less than energy cost of air resistance for a normal train?
My presumption is that the vacuum matter is no trivial undertaking considering the proposals in this article for extremely long tubes all the way across Europe. Not trying to be snarky - I'm not that familiar with the details of Hyperloop and genuinely intrigued by how one would create so much vacuum!
That all said, personally I'm sure NASA will be better served by a SpaceX contract - the relentless iterative pace of the company always shocks me. Hopefully the GAO's assessment will stand up to the legal pressure.
[1.1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/07/06/pentagon-sc...
[1.2] https://www.theregister.com/2021/04/28/aws_jedi_ruling/