- NASA Goddard has issued an RFI to inform GSMO-4
- NASA is considering moving from cost-plus-award-fee to firm-fixed-price pricing
- Missions covered include the James Webb Space Telescope and the GOES weather satellites
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center is gathering industry feedback to plan the next version of its space mission operations contract, which supports a range of space science and Earth science missions.
What Does the Goddard Center Want From Industry?
According to a request for information posted on SAM.gov Thursday, Goddard wants vendors to submit technical approaches and rough-order-of-magnitude cost estimates. The input will shape a potential procurement for Goddard Space Mission Operations-4, which follows the GSMO-3 contract.
The RFI covers two functional areas. The first, mission ground system support, includes ground systems engineering, studies, integration and testing. The second, mission operations system support, covers launch and early operations, flight operations, flight dynamics, data collection and distribution, sustaining engineering, systems administration, IT security, and database administration.
The missions include the Earth Observing System and its data and operations system, Magnetospheric Multiscale, Global Precipitation Measurement, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, the Solar Dynamics Observatory, and the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. They also include the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites NASA builds for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
How Could the Contract Structure Change?
NASA is assessing whether to move all or part of GSMO-4 from a cost-plus-award-fee arrangement to a firm-fixed-price model that includes a performance-based payment structure.
Goddard is also considering catalog-style pricing, which would set routine operations costs by mission risk classification.
Another option would make stable, long-running flagship missions a core baseline requirement. The remaining missions and development work would go out as indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity task orders.
What Has the GSMO-3 Contract Covered?
GSMO-3 provides mission operations services across the full life cycle, from launch support through decommissioning. Its scope has grown to include cloud management, ongoing cyber monitoring, automated DevSecOps and conjunction assessment. KBR secured the five-year, $640 million contract in 2022. The company performed similar tasks for NASA under the GSMO-2 contract that the agency awarded in January 2017, with a $442 million ceiling.
