Keith’s note: I sent the following email request to Glenn Delgado, AA for NASA’s Office of Small Business Programs (OSBP): “I found this tweet to be very interesting. Can you provide me with a list of the specific 800+ small business companies that are contributing to SLS, where they are located, and what their products/services are in relation to SLS? People often do not appreciate just how pervasive NASA programs are in terms of procurement. Moreover it is often not appreciated how deeply these programs can reach into small communities a great distance from the cities/states where space activities are usually associated.”
Keith’s update: No response from Glenn Delgado or NASA PAO but this tweet from @NASA_OSBP just appeared. Impressive report (download). Too bad NASA PAO hasn’t issued a press release about it. Oddly the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration, a pro-SLS/Orion lobbying group, has made no mention at all about it.

Biologist, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA Space Biologist and Payload integrator, Editor of NASAWatch.com and Astrobiology.com, Lapsed climber, Explorer, Synaesthete, Former Challenger Center board member 🖖🏻

6 replies on “The Unexpected Reach Of NASA Programs (Update)”

  3. I’ve seen an ESD slide showing that their supplier base included 49 of 50 states – I forget which state wasn’t an ESD supplier, but it was in the Midwest.

  4. Did you know that all those crazies back in 2011 who said SLS was a jobs program?

  5. There are always two opposing forces battling within NASA; one tries to amalgamate small contracts into bigger ones, to reduce the inefficiencies of multiple lines of management and organizational interfaces. The other force continually tries to break up big contracts into smaller ones to promote small business. Government contracts often encourage or require subcontracting, again under the theory that promoting small business is intrinsically good, and giving additional points to businesses that are owned by women, minorities, people with disabilities, or veterans..

    On the manufacturing side, Boeing and Lockheed contract out a very large percentage of the actual manufacturing. SpaceX in contrast tries to keep everything in-house, complicating the technical task but eliminating the often-expensive organizational boundaries that have to be crossed by contracts, interface documents, etc.

    I do not see any intrinsic value in requiring contractors to subcontract. Some small businesses will expand, some will survive, and some will fail, and it serves no purpose to create more. As to the points for disadvantaged ownership, I don’t see this as much of a benefit to the majority of people who are really disadvantaged as they don’t own companies. I just don’t think creating small businesses is part of the NASA mission.

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