Phil Fraering pgf@AUTO wrote in
:

"Jorge R. Frank" writes:

Indirectly, yes. NASA took over DC-XA when SDIO cancelled it. When it
came time for the next phase, which would have been DC-Y. NASA
re-competed the contract under the name X-33 rather than sole-sourcing
it to MDAC. Procurement law sets out specific circumstances under
which sole-sourcing is allowed (small contracts or lack of other
suppliers in the market), and the circumstances of DC-X did not fit:
the contract was too large and there were other suppliers in the
market. Had NASA sole-sourced it anyway, it would have invited legal
challenges from other potential suppliers and a lot of scrutiny from
Congress. MDAC bid on the re-competed contract but lost to LockMart.
We can debate the relative merits of the X-33 competitors (personally
I preferred MDAC and Rockwell's designs over LockMart's), but not the
necessity of re-competing the contract.

There's something that bugs me about that argument:

When they recompeted the contract, they did not compete a contract for
DC-Y. They competed it for something completely different; the
resulting vehicle was not a decent followon capable of expanding the
envelope of DC-X.

It was a different vehicle with a different flight profile.

The particular flight profile was not relevant; the overall goal (an SSTO
RLV with low per-flight cost) was. So the RFP was written generally enough
for competing approaches to be tried - otherwise, the RFP would have been a
disguised sole-source solicitation to MDAC, since they were the only ones
proposing an SSTO with that particular flight profile.

I was a bit surprised to see NASA write the RFP generally; usually, they
are guilty of overspecifying it to the point that you can tell they had a
particular company/product in mind and wrote the RFP to practically assure
that only that product could win. At least in this area, NASA got X-33
right, in my opinion.

Where NASA screwed up on X-33 was to equate the amount of new technology in
a vehicle with the cost reduction it would be able to achieve, which is
fallacious. So they picked Lockheed's bid, which promised the steepest cost
reductions, but also had the most new technology crammed into one vehicle,
and therefore the most technical risk of all three bidders. Then, when the
development program (predictably) failed, NASA proclaimed that the
technology just wasn't there for SSTO, despite the fact that the two losing
bids had less technical risk and could well have worked. Of course, with
MDAC and Rockwell both subsequently swallowed by Boeing, we'll probably
never know for sure.

I would have preferred to see all three bids funded to a fly-off, as the
DoD often does with aircraft procurements. It would have cost the
government more up-front but would be far less likely to result in failure.
It looks like CEV may be taking this approach.

--
JRF

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