A -- EMERGING LAUNCH CAPABILITY DEVELOPMENT ALTERNATE ACCESS PROJECT

Notice Date

December 6, 2000

Contracting Office

NASA/George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, Procurement Office, Marshall Space Flight Center, AL 35812

ZIP Code

35812

Solicitation Number

RFI-10-17-2000

Response Due

January 15, 2001

Point of Contact

George E. Pendley, Contracting Officer, Phone (256) 544-2949, Fax (256) 544-2812, Email george.pendley@msfc.nasa.gov -- Betty C. Kilpatrick, Contract Specialist, Phone (256) 544-0310, Fax (256) 544-4080, Email betty.kilpatrick@msfc.nasa.gov

E-Mail Address

George E. Pendley (george.pendley@msfc.nasa.gov)

Description

This amendment is issued to clarify objectives of the original RFI and include the following information. The project is for "Emerging Launch Capability Development" and is not limited to alternate access. The first sentence of the RFI is changed to read: "THIS IS NOT A NOTICE OF SOLICITATION ISSUANCE. NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center is hereby soliciting information for potential emerging launch capability development to enhance the competitiveness of the U.S. commercial space launch industry." The due date for responses is changed to January 15, 2001. Minutes From RFI Telecon October 31, 2000 The following information is the minutes from a telecon between MSFC and industry participants. Briefing on MSFC plan on the RFI. MSFC/Background: An agency effort to support emerging companies starting last Fall '99. Administrator had dinner with emerging companies, followed by Round Robin by Art Stephenson and representatives from across the agency where he visited all of the big companies and at that time the emerging company. Purpose of that trip was to communicate all the plans. The ISTP had just been created at that point which is to give you an opportunity to hear first hand about our plans and then have an opportunity to hear what you needed and what you wanted and how you envisioned that you may work with NASA to enable your business goals. Following that Round Robin we began to receive from many of you request for help in various forms across the agency with the different NASA Centers. We at Marshall had a responsibility to work with others Centers to try and create that, or enable that assistance or help and in every case we encountered one obstacle that we just could not seem to overcome and that was funding. The NASA Centers needed additional funding to be able to do the collaborative work with your company that you were proposing. We then began to work with Dan Tam to try to create an appropriate way to help the emerging companies. We tried a couple of things, which we actually completed, we worked on developing policy and procedures within the agency and that did help us. It helped us; it helped those of us internal to the agency working together to try to make these things happen. It provided a guidance and instructions on how we would work together to respond to these request. While that was great for us it did nothing for the companies. We then began following Dan Tams' telecon in late April time fame. He asked us to look at establishing a consortium similar to the AGATE consortium that had been established for General Aviation. We spent quite some time doing that; Jim Taylor from our office working with others in the agency investigating a variety of models, AGATE was one of them. Jim spent a lot of time with Bruce Holmes who was the father of AGATE. Bruce had prepared lots of lesson learned documentation, so Jim and I studied that. Jim spent a lot of time with Bruce going over it and looking at other models, like the rotorcraft consortium model. Jim and I really struggled with that, we felt like it was a worthwhile thing to pursue for the future. But, because of the complexity of establishing such a consortium and the time required we want to begin to work that as a future opportunity. It did not give us what we needed or what you need now, that help now. We began to bounce around ideas on how can we identify the funds to invest in the NASA to respond to this entire request for help that we've been getting from a company. So in that vein and on that path is where we have got to today. You haven't heard from us much in the past few months and one could make the assumption that nothing was going on, but nothing could be further from the truth. None of us like how long it takes to get things done in this environment that we work in. We think we are at a point now, by asking for additional ideas from you, of moving off in the direction that would be beneficial to you as well as appropriate way that we can help. MSFC/Plan In a nutshell what we've done is we looked at what our options were within the funding structure we had for the programs that we had. The decision was made to identify some funding through the alternate access funding line as part of the SLI and make that money available through the NASA Centers. This was so we could answer this request that we felt that we had to enable collaboration between the emerging companies and the NASA Centers. So in order to do that, we wanted to begin to develop what type of activities might be requested or required by the companies. That's the crux of this RFI. The plan is that once we gather the information from the RFI, we will also get the information out of the 90-day studies, which several of you were heavily involved in for alternate access. We will also get some feedback through the procurement cycle that the 2nd generation is currently undergoing both with the NRA8-27 path which are underway now and are getting past their midterm point and also the NRA8-30 activities. We will try to look at areas where the collaborations are important and develop some type of selection criteria for doing that. Now basically what we would do is make this money available, the money would pay the NASA cost of that collaborating. We'd be looking for inputs from everyone as to the types of collaborative activities they are interested in, be it any kind of NASA capabilities, be it facility, be it knowledge bases, be it any other unique capabilities that you need to avail yourself of. Our plan is, although we don't have a hard number of how much money we will have available, our plan is to make multiple awards under this and try and make it as widely available as possible. But in a nutshell, what we are looking for is ways that we can foster collaboration and access to NASA capabilities for the emerging companies. And so our first step was to try to gather this information and put the point of contact out there from the various Centers so that we could began that communication. Obviously some of you have already made some requests, so you are a little ahead in that process over some of the others. This is hopefully the first step of what will be a very fruitful process. MSFC/You got a little heads up that this was coming. We put the response date out to the end of the year, primarily that was driven by fact that the NRA-30, not to mention the holidays coming up. We want to give everybody the maximum time to respond if they were still inclined. That's the reason the dates pushed out to the Dec 29 for response. MSFC/Also one additional point, alternate access might be a potential fund source for this work but your ideas do not have to be limited in scope to just the alternate access effort. MSFC/One of the reasons that the language is as broad as it is, in the RFI, we're really opening this up for any need you have for that and any capability that you feel you need to avail yourself of. We did not want to overly restrict it in anyway because there's a lot of creativity out there and we wanted to try to gather as much information along those lines that we could. MSFC /But, if it turns out to be something that directly applicable to your launch vehicle or transfer vehicle for AAS is all the more better. Question/How closely does this need to be tied to alternate access? I know there are many companies with other ideas besides alternate access that they want to analyses, sounds like you already got that in hand. The other point I would like to make or question raised is that the way that I read this is it kinda strikes me that you got to come in with say with a NASA Center say I wanted to do wind tunnel at Langley, I would go to Langley and make prior negotiations with Langley then we would bid some new RLV that we want to analysis there Aero-thermal facility and we would say it cost X number of $. The problem with that approach is of course engineering is not done neatly, generally months and years in advance with planning. What I would like to open to the group as a thought is if there was someway to take some part of the resources for small company which is the equivalent I call it swiping your credit card at the NASA Center with essentially the charge number and a line of credit up to some amount where company XYZ walks into Langley and says I want to look at some Aero-thermal work they put together one of their famous fast quick models a task you can look at and say the body flap is giving us real problems so I want to go to Ames and to CFP it and come back to MSFC and ask somebody about materials then go back to Langley and rerun it. You can't anticipate that ahead of time in a RFP. What you can say is we want to analysis a particular concept, having a pot that has a 100K or whatever to do that. Do you see where I am going with that? MSFC/Yes I do, and it makes a lot of sense. Obviously that is something that we would definitely welcome your ideas on that. It's something that we would not be opposed to on the surface. The implementation of it, the Devil's in the details, we could get into potentially some accounting problems, with having the money at the right center at the right time. There would have to be some up front work. MSFC/What we would like you to do is for you to share your ideas with us now and I know you have done that through email. We appreciate that and we are trying to take all of these ideas into consideration really, within the limits that we have to stay within as a Federal agency. We want your ideas and we want to find creative and appropriate ways and we want to consider possibilities of all the good thoughts and ideas that we can gather. That is really the purpose of way were doing what we're doing, so please continue to share those and provide those through this process. MSFC/I wanted to add too, that the other thing that would be important to identifying the types of things that you might want to use or be interested in, is to provide a sense of priority to your company. What really is the, you mentioned several things that a certain project might involve, you have a way to prioritize it even if in or by responses. I think that would be helpful to everyone. MSFC/ what do you anticipate as the schedule for this with the responses coming in at the end of Dec.? What do you anticipate the schedule from there in terms of how quickly some of these activities could be turned on? MSFC/ What we believe if we choose and determine that it is beneficial to go forward with the solicitation, we would do that in Feb. time frame with selection by end of March or first of April. If we determine that from the information that we get that its is beneficial and worthwhile to proceed. MSFC/Some of this is a function of how many inputs we get. MSFC/That's our general plan at this point. We have coordinated this very carefully and thoroughly with the 2nd Gen effort and approach and when they have knowledge from their process, as well as the completion of the alternate access studies. Question/How does this tie-in to the risk mitigation activities that might be conducted by alternate accesses; do all of those have to go through this process? Or is that alternate access proceeding on its on track, or does it run parallel? MSFC/Right now that's a separate track. Now if some of these activities serve more than one purpose then from my standpoint all the more better, but as Rose pointed out to start with they're not necessarily restricted to the alternate access thrust. MSFC/They are not restricted to the alternate access or it would all been a part of that same effort. What we wanted to do with this, to separate from the 2nd Gen effort, separate it from alternate access, and create another opportunity. Right now our options that we are seriously considering is a set-aside for small businesses, that's what distinguishes what we are thinking about doing here from the other efforts. So Dave is exactly right to the extent that what you want, and you want to propose, is related to your alternate access approach or work that is going to be your call. But it doesn't have to be restricted to that. Question/Vice-Versa, Alternate Access is not bound using only this approach. MSFC/Absolutely. No, They'll have their own effort outside of this. MSFC/They should likely have an effort outside of this. MSFC /Ok I'm sorry, we needed to clarification on our end. MSFC /Any other questions? Did we cut you off? Question/No, No, that was both the answer I was looking for and hoping for. Question /Going on those questions -- This also applies to NRA8-30. Everyone is going to propose certain risk reduction activities under the 2nd Gen umbrella, and some of those may have synergy with alternate access and somewhere in there, we also have an opportunity. Maybe you could comment on how all those integrate. MSFC /I'll do my best. David may want to chime in here on the relationship between 2nd Gen and the alternate access. From that relationship of 2nd Gen to alternate access, it is become clear to the 2nd Gen office (Dumbacher's folks) that we need to address that confusing intersection between the two efforts and they are in the process of working with David and Dan's office now. What really distinquishes what we're doing here is that it is focused on collaborative work with the NASA Centers. It's not tied to the 2nd Gen risk reduction program focus or the alternate access. It's focused on what we believe, and this is what we haven't made the decision, but we believe that the right option here is to make up a small business set-aside for collaboration with the NASA Centers. That's really the distinguishing characteristic of this effort as compared to the other two. In recognizing that the other two do have some area of intersection that the program offices are now working to clarify for all of you? Does that make sense Jason? Question /Yes that does, you have the same challenge we do. Multiple planning efforts, alternate access is winding down, this is ramping up, NRA8-30 and so how do you navigate that, so we will have a open dialog and keep working on it. MSFC /Let me go back to my opening comments again, kinda why I went through the long story in the beginning because we've been struggling as an agency trying to identify and find a meaningful and appropriate way to work with the emerging companies. The Administrator is dedicated to that. Art Stephenson is absolutely dedicated to that. We've been frustrated on our end, because as we received these requests, which is what we went out and we asked for, how can we work together and most of you quickly told us. We were limited; we were hindered in our ability to respond because of lack of resources in the NASA Centers from the institutional prospective. And we tried a couple of other things, some of them helped certain areas, other are more focused for the future

Web Link

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Record

Loren Data Corp. 20001208/ASOL010.HTM (D-341 SN508265)