By Marina Malenic
The Air Force is doing “everything humanly possible” to ensure that any industry protest of an upcoming multibillion-dollar satellite contract will not be upheld by auditors, but the effort to “protest-proof” the competition may ultimately delay an award, the official in charge of the service’s space programs said yesterday.
“We want to be as thorough as possible in this source selection because if there is a protest we want to make sure we have done everything possible” to deny it, said Gary Payton, the deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for space programs.
“We can’t prevent a protest, but we can do everything now humanly possible to make sure that we win the protest,” he told reporters at an event sponsored by the Space Foundation in Washington.
The service will select either Boeing [BA] or Lockheed Martin [LMT] and its partner Northrop Grumman [NOC] to build and launch the Transformation Satellite (TSAT) system. The new constellation will provide military users with secure communications on the move via lasers instead of radio waves.
Payton said his office has opened the source selection process to oversight from the Pentagon’s acquisition, logistics and technology office.
“We’ve even asked some of Secretary [John] Young’s folks to come in and do an independent scrub of our evaluation processes to get their view on where we might be weak in a protest environment,” he explained.
“So that’s what’s taking the time of doing the selection of which industry team will do full-scale development of TSAT,” he added. “Some of the schedule depends on when those folks come and look at our evaluation processes and how long they take.”
Service officials have said they will not make an award before Dec. 15, but several industry sources have said they expect further delays.
The Air Force has come under scrutiny over several major acquisition programs in recent years. The Pentagon most recently cancelled the competition for an aerial refueling tanker and a pending award to replace the Air Force’s combat search-and-rescue helicopter fleet has twice been successfully protested by industry over irregularities (Defense Daily, Aug. 20).
Payton said his office is redoubling its efforts to award contracts carefully and avoid contested outcomes.
“We don’t want to be cavalier about the selection of winners and losers,” he said.
Budgeting for the TSAT program has also suffered delays, according to Payton, due to a lengthy study of satellite capabilities by Air Force and Pentagon officials this spring.
“That study was supposed to finish in April, but it finished in June, and by that timeframe the Air Force budget…was pretty much set in concrete,” he explained. “We knew we had to change the TSAT budget in response to the…study.
“The [budget] numbers were wrong, and everybody knew it,” he added. “But they were wrong because the…study was completed in June rather than April. And we in the Air Force did not have time to absorb the results.”
The Air Force is now adjusting its budget request to reflect the results of the study. In short, the analysis concluded that the program as outlined in the initial request for proposals is still needed in its entirety. Payton said the budget changes resulting from the study are “being inserted into the Pentagon’s budget right now.”
“So some of Secretary Young’s frustrations are probably around those budget machinations,” he added.
Meanwhile, the risk reduction portion of the program continues apace. In the past, Payton noted, too many military satellite programs have solidified their design before going through that maturation period.
“We’ve stopped doing that,” he said. “And we’re making ourselves go through technology risk reduction work before we settle on the design of the space system or the ground system.”
For example, the contractors have had “huge success” over the past several months in proving out processors that can survive a high-radiation environment, said Payton.”So we’ve been making enormous technical progress in tandem with working the source-selection process,” he said.
Further, Payton said he expects an important decision on the Advanced Extremely High Frequency (AEHF) satellite system–for which TSAT will be a follow-on–next month.
AEHF experienced cost growth that exceeded a congressional spending cap earlier this year due primarily to the late addition of a fourth satellite to the program. It must therefore be recertified as essential to national security (Defense Daily, Sept. 12). The process normally takes four to six months, but the Air Force requested that the AEHF recertification be completed in eight weeks, according to Payton.
“We are on a pace to do that,” he said. “We’re shooting for mid-October to have the certification finished.”