PlanetSpace Protest Denied by GAO

(MoneyWatch)  In January PlanetSpace protested the two commercial contracts awarded by NASA to support the International Space Station (ISS). On Friday the Government Accountability Office (GAO) denied the protest. PlanetSpace can ask the agency to reconsider but that is not a common event.

NASA had awarded Space Exploration Technologies, SpaceX, and Orbital Sciences contracts to develop and launch resupply ships to the ISS during the period after the Space Shuttle was retired and the new launch vehicles, the Orion, that NASA is developing become available. The other way of resupplying the station was to use Russian Soyuz vehicles but NASA wanted to be able to rely on a domestic source for this mission.

While it seems more common to have defense contracts protested NASA has seen several recently. There was one for a weather satellite and of course this protest. These commercial resupply contracts are worth over 3 billion combined and are some of the largest that NASA has ever issued to a private company for the development, production and operation of a space vehicle.