A NASA official asked Boeing if it would protest a major contract it lost. Instead, Boeing resubmitt
Source: Washington Post
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
By Christian Davenport
11/17/2020, 8:00:47 a.m.
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.
Boeing did not protest the award of the lunar lander contract — which was awarded on April 30 to three bidders for a total of nearly $1 billion: a team led by Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin; the defense contractor Dynetics; and Elon Musk’s SpaceX. (Bezos owns The Washington Post.)
But it did something that NASA officials found just as alarming: After Loverro told Chilton that Boeing would not win the award, the company attempted to revise and resubmit its bid. ...
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Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/17/nasa-boeing-lunar-lander-probe/
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