SpaceX has filed a protest challenging a nearly $150 million NASA contract awarded to United Launch Alliance last month to send a robotic asteroid probe into space.
The protest submitted to the Government Accountability Office on Feb. 11 questions a launch contract for NASA’s Lucy science mission to United Launch Alliance. NASA announced Jan. 31 that ULA won the launch contract for the Lucy mission, set for liftoff in October 2021 from Cape Canaveral aboard ULA’s Atlas 5 rocket.
SpaceX said in a statement that it could launch the Lucy mission for less than the $148.3 million awarded to ULA, a 50-50 joint venture between aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
“Since SpaceX has started launching missions for NASA, this is the first time the company has challenged one of the agency’s award decisions,” a SpaceX spokesperson said in a statement. “SpaceX offered a solution with extraordinarily high confidence of mission success at a price dramatically lower than the award amount, so we believe the decision to pay vastly more to Boeing and Lockheed for the same mission was therefore not in the best interest of the agency or the American taxpayers.”
NASA confirmed the protest, saying that the agency issued a stop work order on the Lucy mission after SpaceX’s filing with the GAO. In response to an inquiry from Spaceflight Now, a NASA spokesperson later clarified that the stop work order impacts only the Lucy launch contract, not other work on the mission, which features a spacecraft built by Lockheed Martin and a science team managed by Hal Levison, a researcher based at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Read more
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