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NASA's secret weapon in the lunar space race may be ... procurement reform?
“The pace that’s occurring, and the nature of the procurements, is unprecedented.”
Senior NASA officials held a lengthy news conference last weekend, laying out a series of lunar contract awards, new contract opportunities, and mission decisions. They followed one after the other: landers, nuclear-powered rovers, scouting drones, power generation, storage, and communication satellites.
“Hopefully, we’re keeping industry on their toes trying to catch up to all the solicitations we’re doing,” said Carlos García-Galán, manager of the Moon Base Program, more than 90 minutes into the news conference. “This is what it takes to do the Moon Base in the timeline we have set forth.”
The rapid-fire announcement of awards tells us a few things about NASA’s efforts to return to the Moon and establish a durable settlement there during the next decade.
First, the agency is serious about this effort—the Artemis Moon Base program represents the most credible effort to establish a permanent outpost on another world in NASA’s history. Second, NASA is reaching out to all corners of the US commercial space industry, casting an extraordinarily wide net to reach companies that have yet to fly any hardware into orbit. Third, NASA is getting creative about how it’s buying these services, and this may matter most of all.
There was a lot packed into the announcements this weekend, so to make sense of it all, I called Mike Gold, a lawyer and former NASA associate administrator who set up the Artemis Accords, who is now the president of Redwire Space. He was at NASA at the beginning of Artemis and understands what it takes to get the government moving. He said he was blown away. During a period of seven days, Gold said, NASA put out five proposals for lunar contracts.
“The pace that’s occurring, and the nature of the procurements is unprecedented,” Gold said. “You are seeing an all-hands-on-deck approach. Big companies, small companies, new companies, old companies.”
What has impressed Gold most about NASA’s strategy since announcing the Moon Base in March, at the Ignition event, has been the agency’s evolving procurement strategy. The space agency has adopted a flexible procurement strategy similar to one used by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
There are two components. NASA has largely used a mechanism called Broad Agency Announcements, which ask for a capability such as providing power on the surface of the Moon. This allows NASA to ask industry for ideas without being too prescriptive and levying a bunch of requirements. It’s rather like instead of telling industry precisely what it wants, NASA asks industry what it can do.
Critically, Gold said, the space agency has also used a DARPA-style preliminary proposal process. In response to a traditional procurement, interested companies would prepare a detailed proposal, often running dozens, if not hundreds, of pages. This required an extraordinary amount of time.