URS gets second chance at $435.5M NASA contract
By
Nick Wakeman
URS Federal Services gets a second shot at keeping an incumbent contract at NASA now that the agency has agreed to cancel an award to PAE and re-evaluate proposals.
URS Federal Services and CH2M Hill will get another opportunity to win a $435.5 million NASA contract to support the Marshall Space Flight Center.
The two companies filed protests in February after PAE won the contract to provide operations, maintenance and support services.
URS was the incumbent on the contract, and CH2M Hill and PAE were the challengers.
The Government Accountability Office dismissed the protests after NASA said it would take a corrective action and re-evaluate the bids.
The contract was a nice win for PAE as an expansion of similar work it does at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. PAE officials didn’t return a request for comment.
Marshall in Huntsville, Ala., manages a variety of missions including the International Space Station, robotic planetary probes, studies of Earth’s weather and launch systems for missions beyond Earth’s orbit.
The contract under dispute covers operations and maintenance activities including tools, equipment, engineering and transportation. It is known as the Facilities Operations, Maintenance Support Services contract or FOMSS. Before the protests, the contract was supposed to run through August 2023 with options.
Work also was to have begun on March 1, but that date was scuttled because of the protests.