Sierra Nevada Corp. Files Legal Challenge Against NASA Commercial Contracts

New submitter Raymondware sends an update to last week's news that NASA had awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to provide rockets for future manned spaceflight. Now, one of their competitors, Sierra Nevada Corp, has announced it will launch a legal challenge to the contracts. The company claims the government is spending $900 million more than it needs to for equivalent fulfillment, and they're demanding a review. They add, Importantly, the official NASA solicitation for the CCtCap contract prioritized price as the primary evaluation criteria for the proposals, setting it equal to the combined value of the other two primary evaluation criteria: mission suitability and past performance. SNC’s Dream Chaser proposal was the second lowest priced proposal in the CCtCap competition. SNC’s proposal also achieved mission suitability scores comparable to the other two proposals. In fact, out of a possible 1,000 total points, the highest ranked and lowest ranked offerors were separated by a minor amount of total points and other factors were equally comparable.

Comments

Boeing bought more politicians.

[banbeans]

Leaving out Boeing would be budget suicide for NASA.

Re:Boeing bought more politicians.

[Karmashock]

I'd love to see that too. The companies tend to argue that sans some sort of contract down the line it isn't cost effective to invest in a system when they might not ever see a return from it.

There is some validity in that especially if no company takes you offer which might be the case.

That said... I too would like it to work as you describe. On a launch by launch basis. As to cost being the primary critiera... I agree it should be a very important or even primary one. I only worry about safety etc. Yeah, the insurance costs could help manage things but the insurance industry can't predict failure rates without statistics and that requires a significant amount of data that would not exist. To that end, you would have to audit the safety and reliability of each design as best you could. Yes, they could be corrupt and say designs are bad when they're not. But the alternative is to just let everything be determined statistically which would require a significant number of failures to give you some baselines on each design.

Anyway, generally favorable... just think you'd have to be careful about it. People tend to be very intolerant to failures in this industry. Remember NASA crashed a few probes into Mars under its "better, faster, cheaper" model... and then retired that policy with the result that now they do everything very slowly and quite expensively to make sure everything is perfect. If you have too many crashes people are going to insist the damn things be better built and that will change the model back to what we have now. So... just keep that in mind.

Re:Boeing bought more politicians.

[demachina]

This contact is for carrying people in to LEO, not satellites or cargo. Your argument doesn't work for human rated launchers.

First, it is difficult and expensive to human rate a launch vehicle so not very many companies are going to do it without a reasonable chance of getting business.

It is also probably not a place you want a company cutting corners to low ball a contract bid. The first priority is keeping the cargo alive, not saving a few dollars by going with launch-by-night Rockets-R-US.

Past performance?

[Insanity Defense]

So how is the Dream Chaser on past performance for orbital flights? No such flights? I see why it was not chosen because of past performance or lack there of.

Re:Past performance?

[ihtoit]

Boeing and SpaceX have BOTH demonstrated technological ability in space, SN have not.

Are you going to buy an untested car from an unknown manufacturer, load your kids in it and drive it cross country?
Or are you going to buy a Ford?