Story 2014-10-14 2TBR Why Boeing beat SpaceX and Sierra Nevada in NASA "space taxi" competition

Why Boeing beat SpaceX and Sierra Nevada in NASA "space taxi" competition

by
in legal on (#2TBR)
story imageShortly after NASA awarded Boeing and SpaceX mult-billion dollar contracts in the "space taxi" program, Sierra Nevada Corporation filed a lawsuit against NASA challenging its loss to Boeing, despite submitting a cheaper bid. While the lawsuit caused NASA to immediately request Boeing and SpaceX to halt work on their vehicles, they've now reversed course and requested the programs be restarted. NASA stated that a delay in providing transportation services to the ISS crew will put the crew at risk and will highly affect several operations of the ISS. This delay may even result in the US failure to fulfill the commitments it made in its international agreements.

The lawsuit is starting to result in private internal documents coming out of the woodwork and into public view. While many speculated that NASA was fully behind SpaceX and only granted Boeing a chunk of the contract for political reasons, it seems that Boeing was ranked above SpaceX in every major category, from technical maturity to management competence to likelihood of sticking to a timetable. Despite SpaceX's historic achievement of becoming the first commercial entity to put a capsule into orbit and ferry NASA cargo to and from the international space station, the agency had somewhat less assurance in the company's ability to perform, based on performance on its own preliminary contract.
Reply 3 comments

Well.... (Score: 1, Interesting)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-14 16:35 (#2TBX)

It's still very possible that the rankings themselves were assigned "for political reasons". Everything's a judgment call, after all, and all kinds of organizations are often at the whims (direct or indirect) of their leaders.

' Boeing's submission was considered "excellent" for "mission suitability," whereas SpaceX got a "very good" ranking. The numerical scores for that category, according to one person familiar with the details, were separated by more than 60 points out of a possible 1,000. The document shows Boeing also garnered the highest ranking of "excellent" for technical approach and program management, compared with "very good" rankings for SpaceX. '

"Yeah, the director's really high on SpaceX lately, but he also has history with his old pals at Boeing, so how much do I put down here on this questionnaire for 'technical maturity'. Hmm."

Makes sense to me (Score: 2, Insightful)

by billshooterofbul@pipedot.org on 2014-10-14 18:00 (#2TC2)

From a layman's perspective:

Boeing is Boeing. They know how to manage complex technical programs .

SpaceX is SpaceX. They were the first commercial suppliers of the space station.

SNC is ???. As far as I'm aware they haven't built a complete craft like this before anywhere near this scale. They've built parts and engines, but not the whole kit and kabootle.

I'm sure by granting Boeing they were appeasing the more risk adverse people at NASA, and by going with SpaceX they appeased the more innovative faction. I don't know if SNC had anyone emotionally tied to its proposal. Not that "emotion" was a criteria. But we'd be lying to ourselves if we were to pretend that emotion had no role at all.

It should have been named (Score: 1, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-10-15 09:38 (#2TCD)

Farscape-1