A federal judge has apparently granted an extension to the lawsuit filed by Blue Origin against the US government and SpaceX, in part due to the Department of Justice (DoJ) failing to convert some docs into PDFs in time. The portable filed were apparently too large for the court to handle, standing at over 7GB of data, said the government in a filing with the Us Court of Federal Claims on Friday. As such, they cannot be uploaded as administrative records to the court’s filing system, and instead, will have to be transferred as DVDs.
Following the same, the Department of Justice has said that there exists a “good cause” for extending the motion, seeing as how the documents are “extraordinarily voluminous,” having been compiled using “hundreds of individual documents.” Both SpaceX and Blue Original have agreed to the extension.
A Limit Of 50MB
The government has asked for more time to process the data. Much like many other courts, the US Court of Federal Claims, too, has limited the file size for being uploaded to its online system, to a measly 50MB (megabytes). But that’s not the only issue at hand, since attorneys speaking on behalf of the DoJ have said that the administrative records are present in a number of different formats, including PDFs. Some of these formats are rather difficult to convert into PDFs, and even if they were convertible, the Department would be forced to upload “several hundred” files before the entire set of data was fed into the court system.
The lawyers have added that they could group the data in individual documents into different sets of 50MB PDFs, using software like Adobe Acrobat. But while this would reduce the total number of uploads, it would also bring about “additional opportunity for the system to crash,” due to increased load. This would be because Acrobat can help users split larger files into smaller ones, but it cannot do so at a single time without crashing. The attorneys say that they have already tried multiple ways to club the data into manageable PDFs, but haven’t found success as yet.
NASA Deal Halt Extended Too?
While asking for an extension, DoJ attorneys have apparently also called for the pause on NASA’s moon-lander contract with SpaceX to be extended. The contract had been halted after being restarted, following an initial halt in April.
The original date mentioned in the filing by Blue Origin had been November 1, and while the revision on Friday omits the date altogether, attorneys have proposed a restart date of November 8.
granted an extension to the lawsuit filed by Blue Origin against the, in part due to the (DoJ) failing to convert docs into PDFs in time
