Boeing Submits Offer for NASA’s Facilities Development and Operations Contract

ST. LOUIS.- Boeing [NYSE: BA] submitted a proposal to NASA today for the Facilities Development and Operations Contract (FDOC), a four-year contract under which Boeing plans to work in collaboration with NASA to bring innovative, affordable solutions to the agency’s next-generation mission control center and other facilities at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Boeing plans to draw extensively on its experience on space, military and commercial programs to improve the efficiency of NASA’s facilities operations.

NASA’s Johnson Space Center Mission Operations Directorate will manage FDOC, which consolidates a portion of the current Space Program Operations and Mission Support Operations contracts. FDOC includes development, sustaining engineering, operations and maintenance of the training, flight-planning, reconfiguration and control-center facilities for human spaceflight programs. The contract also includes developing and maintaining the software applications used in these facilities.

NASA is scheduled to select a contractor in November, with work starting in January 2009. The four-year contract will have two one-year options that could extend the agreement to 2014.

“We are proposing an approach that draws from Boeing’s relevant commercial and defense experience, including our industry-leading training and control centers,” said Peggy Thomas, Boeing FDOC program manager. “We hope to play a big part in developing an even better Mission Operations Directorate.”

Boeing comes to the FDOC contract with extensive control-center experience on the Iridium constellation of satellites. Iridium is a group of 66 satellites, with multiple backups, that provides mobile voice- and data-communications capability anywhere in the world.

Boeing is the world leader in building high-technology training systems for defense and commercial-airplane programs and has developed trainers for Boeing’s commercial-airplane product line used extensively by a wide variety of commercial, defense and other customers.

Another advantage for Boeing is its sustaining-engineering experience on the International Space Station and Space Shuttle programs, which are supported under the new FDOC contract.

“Our experiences in the defense and commercial businesses offer affordable options to NASA as the agency moves into the next generation of space exploration,” said Thomas.