WASHINGTON — NASA awarded Stinger Ghaffarian Technologies (SGT) a nine-year contract worth up to $1.3 billion to provide mission and flight crew operations support for the international space station and future human space exploration, the agency announced July 14.
The contract includes a pair of options that would keep SGT on as NASA’s main space station support contractor until Sept. 30, 2024 — the date through which the White House in January proposed extending the station’s orbital mission. Work will take place mostly at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, NASA’s lead center for the ISS program.
The company has supported Johnson human spaceflight projects before, but never on such a large scale as the contract just awarded will require, SGT spokeswoman Shelley Johnson wrote in a July 17 email.
SGT employs about 1,950 people now and will ramp up to about 2,400 after the Integrated Mission Operations Contract 2 award phases in Oct. 1, Johnson said. The company had about $450 million in revenue for 2014 and a roughly $2 billion backlog, not counting the contract award announced July 14. Most of SGT’s revenue comes from NASA, and the company has contracts at six of the agency’s field centers. Among the largest of those is the Mechanical Systems Engineering Services 2 contract with the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Awarded in 2007, NASA announced an extension July 11 under which the pact could be worth up to $430 million for SGT through September 2015.
Major SGT subcontractors under the new ISS support contract include Lockheed Martin Information Systems & Global Solutions, Gaithersburg, Maryland; GHG Corp., Webster, Texas; and GeoControl Systems and Cimarron Software Services, both in Houston.
The contract just awarded to SGT combines many of the services NASA pays for under a pair of legacy contracts: Lockheed Martin’s Facilities Development and Operations Contract, and United Space Alliance’s Integrated Mission Operations Contract.
Besides supporting the space station with engineering services and products, the cost-plus-award indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract keeps Greenbelt-based SGT on call to help NASA with other programs including:
- the Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle, the Johnson-managed deep-space crew capsule Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver is building for NASA.
- the Space Launch Systems heavy-lift rocket, construction of which is being managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.
- the commercial crew program, NASA’s effort to replace the retired shuttle’s crew-carrying capacity to ISS with one of three commercially designed spacecraft by 2017.
- the Lunar Precursor Robotics Program.
- the Human Research Program.
- the Exploration Technology Program.
- commercial cargo, and advanced technology and research.
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