GAO Rejects Challenge to NASA’s Space Shuttle Services Contracts with Boeing and SpaceX

Back in September 2014, NASA awarded contracts to Boeing and SpaceX to provide Commercial Crew Transportation Capability (aka space shuttle services) to transport astronauts to/from the International Space Station by 2017.  Subsequently, Sierra Nevada, who submitted a proposal but was not awarded a contract, filed a protest at GAO challenging the awards to Boeing and SpaceX.  This week GAO announced that it had denied Sierra Nevada’s protest.

Although GAO has not yet publicly released a formal decision on the protest, it did issue a press release providing some insight on the reasons why NASA selected Boieng and SpaceX over Sierra Nevada, and why Sierra Nevada’s protest has been denied:

In making its selection decision, NASA concluded that the proposals submitted by Boeing and SpaceX represented the best value to the government.  Specifically, NASA recognized Boeing’s higher price [$3.01 billion], but also considered Boeing’s proposal to be the strongest of all three proposals in terms of technical approach, management approach, and past performance, and to offer the crew transportation system with most utility and highest value to the government.  NASA also recognized several favorable features in the Sierra Nevada and SpaceX proposals, but ultimately concluded that SpaceX’s lower price [$1.75 billion] made it a better value than the proposal submitted by Sierra Nevada [$2.55 billion].

GAO disagreed with Sierra Nevada’s arguments about NASA’s evaluation, and found no undue emphasis on NASA’s consideration of each offeror’s proposed schedule, and likelihood to achieve crew transportation system certification not later than 2017.  GAO also noted that, contrary to Sierra Nevada’s assertions, the RFP clearly advised offerors that their proposals would be evaluated against the goal of certification by the end of 2017.

Sierra Nevada also argued that NASA conducted an inadequate review of the realism of SpaceX’s price and overall financial resources, conducted a flawed and disparate evaluation of proposals under the mission suitability evaluation factor, and improperly evaluated the relevance of offerors’ past performance.  Based on our review of the issues, we concluded that these arguments were not supported by the evaluation record or by the terms of the solicitation.

A redacted copy of GAO’s decision will likely be made public in the next few weeks.

Interestingly, this is not the first clash at GAO precipitated by NASA’s retirement of its space shuttles and privatization of the space program.  As discussed in an earlier post, in 2013 and 2014 GAO issued protest decisions concerning Blue Origin’s challenge to a lease awarded to SpaceX for NASA’s historic Launch Complex 39a at the Kennedy Space Center.