WASHINGTON –
Rocketplane Kistler (RpK) is not going down without a fight.
Less than
24 hours after being notified that NASA was pulling the plug on a 14-month-old
agreement to help finance the company's effort to develop a commercial
transportation service to and from the international space station, RpK
appealed the decision.
NASA
announced Oct. 18 it intends to take the $175 million previously committed to
RpK under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program and put
it back out for competition in a matter of days. The agency plans to release a
solicitation for a new full and open COTS competition Oct. 22 and give
prospective bidders 30 days to submit proposals.
"We
spent the last year trying to work with RpK to give them every opportunity to
succeed," Alan Lindenmoyer, the NASA official in charge of the COTS
program, said during an Oct. 18 press conference here. "Based on its
failure to meet its performance milestones, we've come to the conclusion that
it is in NASA's best interest to discontinue our funded Space Act Agreement and
reopen the competition."
An attorney
for RpK of Oklahoma City, sent NASA a letter Oct. 19 asking the agency to
either reconsider the termination or give the company $10 million for progress
it made toward its unmet milestones.
Under the
terms of its Space Act Agreement, RpK cannot appeal its termination to the U.S.
Government Accountability Office, which normally referees government
contracting disputes.
RpK can,
however, sue NASA in federal court. But the company first must exhaust a
three-step appeals process that begins with NASA's COTS contracting officer and
ends with the agency's associate administrator for exploration systems, Rich
Gilbrech, who signed off on RpK's termination.
In RpK's
Oct. 19 letter, a copy of which was obtained by Space News, the attorney
calls NASA's actions "arbitrary, capricious, and an abuse of discretion
that will not withstand judicial scrutiny should this matter remain unresolved
after the three NASA levels of review."
NASA
spokeswoman Melissa Mathews said RpK's appeal will not delay the agency's
planned COTS solicitation. "The Oct. 18 termination letter is a final
agency decision," she said.
RpK was one
of two companies NASA picked in mid-2006 to share some $500 million in public
funding to help build and demonstrate competing vehicles capable of carrying
cargo and potentially crews to the international space station. The other COTS
winner was Space Exploration Technologies Corp. of El Segundo, Calif., which Lindenmoyer said has met all of its milestones to date, including a recent
NASA-led critical design review for a planned 2009 demonstration flight of the
firm's Falcon 9 rocket and reusable Dragon capsule. Space Exploration
Technologies has completed six milestones to date, earning
$95 million of the $278 million it is entitled to under its COTS agreement.
RpK
struggled from the beginning of the COTS program to raise the private capital
it needed to complete its fully reusable K-1 rocket, which has been in
development for more than a decade. But it was not until well after RpK failed
to meet a renegotiated May deadline for completing its financing – and then
missed a key early technical milestone – that NASA moved to terminate the
agreement.
Lindenmoyer
said RpK was told it could continue to work with NASA on the K-1 through an
unfunded COTS agreement similar to ones the agency has awarded to a half-dozen
companies interested in selling resupply services to the international space
station after the space shuttle retires in 2010.
Lindenmoyer
also said RpK is free to submit a new proposal when the new COTS solicitation
is released. NASA hopes to evaluate proposals and make its new selection or
selections during the first quarter of 2008, he said.
advertisement
