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The battle for juicy NASA contracts is heating up as the space shuttle nears retirement in 2010 and work continues on the Constellation program to replace it.

NASA announced on Friday that it's terminating a potentially $745 million contract with Oceaneering International, Inc. of Houston to make new space suits (left) for Constellation, which is supposed to return us to the moon by 2020.

Exploration Systems & Technology, Inc., a competitor for the contract, filed a protest with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) after NASA awarded it on June 12 to Oceaneering.

"NASA looked at the protest and determined there was some corrective action needed," agency spokesperson Grey Hautaluoma told SciAm.com. The protest is under a GAO "protective order," Hautaluoma added, which means NASA can't say anything more.

According to Reuters, NASA officials wrote in a letter last week that the agency had not asked Oceaneering to disclose its "cost accounting standards." The letter said NASA plans to hold "limited discussions" about new proposals with Oceaneering and United Technologies Corp., whose Hamilton Sundstrand unit has been NASA's primary space suit contractor since 1981.

The conflicts go beyond space suits. The Orlando Sentinel reports that a "potentially damaging legal dustup" has broken out between Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK), the company building the new Ares rocket, and United Space Alliance (USA), NASA's main contractor for the space shuttle.

According to the Sentinel, USA filed suit Friday alleging that ATK defrauded the shuttle contractor and violated a long-term contract between the two by poaching engineers from USA.

The Sentinel cited unnamed industry sources worried that the legal battle could delay a test flight planned for next year of the Ares I-X rocket, a smaller version of the Ares I. USA also claimed that ATK's hiring of skilled shuttle workers could endanger the final 10 shuttle flights.

More on Ares I tomorrow in a NASA teleconference that is supposed to address concerns that the rocket as designed could shake itself apart—along with the Orion crew module perched atop it—during liftoff.

Related: Could the Russia-Georgia conflict jeopardize U.S. space plans?

Image credit: NASA

2 Comments

1. 1. zenno 05:25 PM 8/18/08

   is this for real. we supposedly sent man to the moon in 1969 and their going back in 2020 lol. crazy. 51 years later we can only manage to go back to the moon. no wonder people think the 1969 moon landing was fake. how or why is it taking them 51 years to go back. and why would they want to go back after this amount of time beggers belief. if there was amazing new metals to be found on the moon why would they leave it this long to go back. my whole thinking on this is...they have two space programs the nasa and the military top secret one. there is some proof on the military use of advanced spacecraft technology. so i really think nasa is there to blind us from the secret military space program. just like any top secret aircraft the military had before we of course will not know about these, as the "words" top secret programs say it all.

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2. 2. sekhmetjohnson in reply to zenno 01:19 AM 2/5/09

   Look, it took them 1969 years to get there the first time.

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