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.

[ShanghaiBill]

Leaving out Boeing would be budget suicide for NASA.

No one should be left out because there should be no contract. Instead, NASA should be fostering a spot market for launches. They should have a separate bid for each launch: "We want X satellite in Y orbit, and insured for Z dollars." Then give the launch to the lowest bidder. That way each company can work continuously to cut costs and improve services, knowing that if they leapfrog the competition, they can win the next launch, instead of being locked out for years.

Re:Boeing bought more politicians.

[Anonymous Coward]

right!! the country of India just proved how they can get the job done, with a satellite that cost less then some moronic movie, and it turned out to be a success.

I'm not yelling at you, but the entire NASA program is a waste of money and time. How one nation can do what NASA does with a cheap but effective solution.

NASA gives out contracts to companies that are infective and expensive, compared to companies that are cheaper but still get the job done. Boeing is a laughing joke to begin with cutting ties with them would save the government billions. Thats the problem with this country, lets not look at another and say WOW, lets just flush time and money down a toilet to pretend we are great.

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.

[Luckyo]

The difference being that they saved on everything. The main reason why it was so cheap was because payload was positively tiny. It's not actually very expensive to get a light payload into space.

The costs increase as the weight of payload and accuracy requirements go up. They increase further as durability requirements on hardware, reliability requirements (very stringent on manned flights for example) and other similar factors go up.

India did an excellent job with their project. But it was still quite expensive, they had a lot of help from Russians who are champions in the field of sending stuff in space efficiently (saved on research) and so on. This stuff is expensive, and those who do the base research and development incur costs orders of magnitude higher than what it cost Indians.

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.

Re:Boeing bought more politicians.

[ihtoit]

I don't think low-bidding should ever be a consideration. That's how Thiokol got in to the STS and boardroom creep killed Challenger. The bottom line overrode safety considerations - the engineers said "You launch, the vehicle will explode", the board disagreed. They wanted to save however many thousands of Dollars on yet another launch hold and just fucking light that thing off. The ultimate price in human life was collected.

Re:Boeing bought more politicians.

[ShanghaiBill]

I don't think low-bidding should ever be a consideration. That's how Thiokol got in to the STS

Baloney. That is the opposite of what happened. The boosters were made in Utah because a senator from Utah headed the appropriations committee that dealt with NASA. The explosion had nothing to do with low-ball capitalism, and everything to do with sleazy pork barrel politics.

Re:Boeing bought more politicians.

[Immerman]

The engineers new ahead of time that the gasket was likely to fail. They informed management in a timely manner. At that point where the thing was built was no longer relevant, the question was simply do we delay the launch and replace/reengineer the gasket, or not?

Re:Manned space flight!

[Dzimas]

The Atlas V rocket that Boeing will use to launch the CST-100 has launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and the Mars Science Laboratory. It's not just about LEO and maintaining the ISS, although that is a short-term goal. SpaceX also has their sights set on more ambitious goals, but sadly they are restricted by NASA's budget and goals -- there simply are no commercially viable space missions beyond satellite launches right now.

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?

It was NASA's only option

[Dereck1701]

NASA didn't really have any other choice. They couldn't give the entire contract to Boeing without risking falling into the same defense contractor cost plus revolving door situation that has held back our space program for decades. They couldn't give the entire contract to SpaceX without causing an uproar in the "space belt" congressmen/women that could possibly scuttle the entire CCtCap/CCDev/CCDev2 program (which they've been trying to do anyway). So they took a middle of the road approach, with both SpaceX and Boeing providing launch services they keep enough political support to keep the program afloat but down the road having the two compared side by side either encourages Boeing to keep its prices reasonable to stay in the game or gives NASA the evidence to say "hey, we've got two proven launch systems and one is costing us a whole lot more than the other, why are we still using them" in a public congressional budget hearing. SNC just had the position of being the lesser of the two second chair choices, not saying its right but that's politics unfortunately.

Re:It was NASA's only option

[Dereck1701]

And what exactly were these "milestones"? The only one that I can really confirm is the Critical Design Review, which Boeing only recently completed (no word on how close SpaceX is). Even if they aren't neck and neck with Boeing on their paperwork they should get some points owing to the fact that they're actually flying at least a version of their hardware (ISS Resupply) when Boeing is just testing out components.

Re:Another Factor?

[harperska]

Maybe, probably not. All of the problems with the shuttle were not due to it being a spaceplane per se, but due to it being a sideways stack rather than a vertical one. Dream Chaser is designed instead to be on top of a rocket, either an Atlas V or Falcon 9.

Challenger failed because the failed o-ring between the segments of an SRB caused a jet of flame that impinged on the external tank. Falcon 9 doesn't use any SRBs. Atlas V doesn't use multi-segment shuttle style SRBs, and may not use SRBs at all for manned launches. Either way, that particular failure mode would be the fault of the booster and not the vehicle. In addition, by being on the top of the stack, if there is any sort of catastrophic failure of the booster, the vehicle is equipped with a launch escape system that was impossible on the shuttle.

The Columbia accident, as well as countless near-misses that could have resulted in a Columbia style accident, was due to debris detaching from the external tank and striking the orbiter. If the vehicle is on top of the stack, nothing that breaks off of the rocket can physically come into contact with the vehicle.

Therefore Dream Chaser isn't vulnerable to either of the causes of loss of a shuttle orbiter, and being a spaceplane has nothing to do with it.

Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser

[Required Snark]

Sierra Nevada Corporation, aka SNC has a real nice web page with a whole lot of very pretty pictures.

They also have a very extensive Wikipedia entry for the Dream Chaser which goes into minute detail about every contract they have received and every milestone they have achieved. It is so detailed and gleaming that it was obviously crafted by someone in the pay of SNC.

However, it you read the whole thing you can find some very interesting information in he very last section listing their technology partners.

It turns out that Lockheed-Martin is responsible for "airframe construction and human rating of the spaceplane". SNC has designed a lifting body capsule, and hybrid rubber/NO rocket engine. Based on the partners list, it seems that they are acting as a systems integrator, and everything outside the design and rocket is not in house technology.

So if NASA is making the step to commercial human rated spaceflight, are they better off choosing companies who have already demonstrated orbital launch capabilities, or someone that does not even have the ability to build their own space capsule? When something goes wrong (and something will) imaging the finger pointing in the SNC scenario. This explains why NASA made the safe choice.

This suit, although filed by SNC, seems like an attempt by Lockheed-Martin to get a chunk of the billion dollar pie. What do they have to loose? Their name isn't on any of the legal paperwork, so they can pretend to be out of the loop. Meanwhile the congress-critters from Lockheed will be fighting it out with their counterparts from Boeing behind closed doors. This won't be decided in the courts, or in any public forum.

It's not about public policy or access to space, it's about corporate profit. If you want to know why NASA seems so screwed up, just follow the money.

Re:Another Factor?

[harperska]

The GP argument was that Dream Chaser was rejected simply because it was a spaceplane like the shuttle, implying that the issues with the shuttle were due to it being a spaceplane. Yes, there were plenty of procedural issues that caused the mechanical issues to be a problem. If management had listened to the engineers about the limitations of the o-rings, it could have prevented the challenger disaster. Regardless, the point is that the shuttle had that particular point of failure, which Dream Chaser would not, and it has nothing to do with whether Dream Chaser is a spaceplane or not.