Gerstenmaier on commercial crew contract awards: they “roughly” fit within the budget

Shortly after sunrise last Friday morning I caught up with Bill Gerstenmaier, who oversees NASA’s human spaceflight programs. Gerst, as he’s known in the spaceflight community, did not appear to be in a great mood.

I chalked it up to fatigue. We were in a small theater in downtown Baikonur, Kazakhstan. About six hours earlier we’d watched the launch of a Soyuz rocket to the space station, and we’d pretty much been up the entire night.

Gerstenmaier. (NASA)

Gerstenmaier. (NASA)

I wanted to ask Gerstenmaier about the commercial crew contract NASA had awarded to Boeing and SpaceX to develop space taxis to the International Space Station. NASA will give $4.2 billion to Boeing and $2.6 billion to SpaceX to complete development of their spacecraft, and begin flying as soon as 2017.

My understanding was that NASA had about $4 billion to award, so i was surprised when it gave $6.8 billion in awards. I asked Gerst, who made the final decision on the contract awards, about this and here was his response:

The thing that’s kind of confusing in the contract structure is that’s the maximum value of the contracts. That includes six flights for each one of the offers, and some of that is in the crew transportation language in the ISS. So when you look at that and you spread it out over the entire duration it kind of roughly fits within the budget. We’ve still got some details to do, some phasing to do, but that’s where it is. 

Essentially I think he’s saying that the contracts are longer than originally anticipated, and instead of covering three flights they cover six flights.

It wasn’t until late Friday night that I found out why Gerst might have been unhappy. That’s when the losing bidder, Sierra Nevada Corp., filed a legal challenge against NASA saying it improperly awarded the contracts.

Sierra Nevada contends that its bid was $900 million less than Boeing’s, and that on technical merits the bids were of equal value. If that’s the case, the legal challenge could get interesting.

However such legal challenges to government contracts are fairly common, and usually don’t amount to much. Still, it will be interesting to watch.

Unless you’re Bill Gerstenmaier, of course.

Eric Berger