Possible Protest to NASA Award to Orbital for Supply Missions

As we wrote about a few days ago NASA awarded Orbital Sciences and SpaceX two contracts to conduct commercial launches to supply the International Space Station (ISS). Now The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the third company that bid, PlanetSpace Inc, may protest one of the awards. Somehow somebody has been talking about the post award conference where the government briefs the companies on why the won or loss. PlanetSpace is looking at the larger Orbital contract to protest. PlanetSpace is a joint venture of Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Alliant Techsystems. Technically you would have thought the two main manufacturers of space launch vehicles for the U.S. would have had a better technical solution then the two smaller companies. Protests are rare of NASA contracts due to its history but this use of commercial, firm fixed price contracts is new to them and their contractors are facing many of the pressures that Defense ones do. The protest will need to be filed soon so more to come very quickly.