A NASA official asked Boeing if it would protest a major contract it lost.

[Zorro]

Source: Washington Post

Complete headline: A NASA official asked Boeing if it would protest a major contract it lost. Instead, Boeing resubmitted its bid.

The conversation between NASA’s Doug Loverro and Boeing’s Jim Chilton is now the subject of a grand jury investigation

Boeing’s bid to build a spacecraft capable of flying NASA astronauts to the moon didn’t meet NASA’s requirements, and the company was going to lose out on a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But NASA was worried that the corporate giant would protest the contract award, potentially holding it up for months at a time when the space agency was trying to meet a White House mandate to get astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024.

So in February, Doug Loverro, then the head of NASA’s human exploration directorate, called Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing’s space and launch division, to explain that the company was going to lose the contract and to inquire whether it would file a challenge, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

That call, which occurred during a period when the agency was to have no contact with any of the bidders, is now the subject of investigations by the NASA inspector general and the Justice Department into the integrity of the procurement, according to multiple people. It also led NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine to force Loverro to abruptly resign in May.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/nasa-boeing-lunar-lander-probe/

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The timing of Loverro's resignation earlier this year was very curious, happening just before the manned test flight in SpaceX's Dragon capsule. There was some speculation at the time that it was because of Loverro's lack of confidence in the integrity of Dragon testing prior to a manned mission.

Now it looks like his resignation was due to something else, entirely.

[Best_man23]

1. Boeing Should be Immediately Disqualified

This is improper communication, even though it was initiated by the government. House Armed Services and Oversight committees need to look into Loverro's handling of this. In most cases, this type of improper contact would immediately disqualify the contractor in question (Boeing).

He should have asked Darleen Druyun for advice. She would likely have told him to say nothing. Emphasis in the following is mine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darleen_Druyun

"In May 2003, the United States Air Force announced it would lease 100 KC-767 tankers to replace the oldest 136 of its KC-135s. ...In November 2003, the Air Force decided it would lease 20 KC-767 aircraft and purchase 80 tankers. After leaving the Air Force in 2003, Druyun took a job with Boeing at an annual salary of $250,000. She also received a $50,000 signing bonus.

In December 2003, the Pentagon announced the project was to be frozen while an investigation of allegations of corruption by Druyun was begun. Druyun pleaded guilty to inflating the price of the contract to favor her future employer and to passing information on the competing Airbus A330 MRTT bid (from EADS). CBS News called it "the biggest Pentagon scandal in 20 years" and said that she pleaded guilty to a felony. In October 2004, Druyun was sentenced to nine months in federal prison for corruption, fined $5,000, given three years of supervised release, and 150 hours of community service."