Science Applications International Corp. has received a potential seven-year, $494 million recompete contract to provide safety and mission assurance support services at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston and White Sands Test Facility in New Mexico. The Safety and Mission Assurance Engineering Contract III covers safety, reliability, engineering and quality and software assurance support for NASA programs in deep space, including the Gateway lunar space station, Orion spacecraft and Extravehicular Activity and Human Surface Mobility, NASA said Friday.

Leidos has delivered to NASA a test version of the universal stage adapter that will be used to connect the exploration upper stage of the Block 1B variant Space Launch System to the Orion spacecraft. NASA said Wednesday the full-scale prototype arrived at Building 4619 at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where it will undergo modal testing to validate dynamic models and ultimate load testing to assess the test article's structure.

IBM has teamed up with NASA to build a suite of transformer architecture-based language models designed to give the scientific and academic community access to vast amounts of scientific knowledge and information. The IBM-NASA models were trained on 60 billion tokens from a collection of astrophysics, earth science, planetary science, heliophysics and biological and physical sciences data.

Join the Potomac Officers Club’s 5th Annual Artificial Intelligence Summit on March 21. Register here.

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has released a solicitation for the development of flight instruments for the Space Weather Next Lagrange 1 Series Coronagraph program. A notice posted Friday on SAM.gov states that NASA will launch a full and open competition to design, analyze, develop and fabricate three flight coronagraph instruments for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite program.

NASA has awarded 15 companies spots on a five-year, $45 million firm-fixed-price, indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract in support of the Flight Opportunities and Small Spacecraft Technology programs. Winning contractors will be tasked to provide flight services and carry out the integration of payloads like science instruments and technology demonstrations onto a variety of platforms, including suborbital rockets, balloons and satellites, NASA said Monday.

Sidus Space has integrated NASA Stennis Space Center's Autonomous Satellite Technology for Resilient Applications engineering unit into its LizzieSat FlatSat small satellite vehicle in preparation for its upcoming launch. The company said Thursday the integration was completed at its facility in Cape Canaveral, Florida, and involved multiple integration and communications tests to verify the ability to load the ASTRA flight software into the engineering unit.

Join the Potomac Officers Club’s 2024 Space Summit on March 5. Click here to register!

Executive Mosaic is excited to announce that NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has received a 2024 Wash100 Award for his commitment to empowering cooperative scientific exploration and technological progress through various agency missions. The esteemed Wash100 Award has honored the most influential leaders in the government contracting industry for 11 years.

The Wash100 popular vote contest is in full swing! Click here to cast your vote for Nelson as your favorite 2024 winner.

NASA has selected Seventh Sense Consulting to provide acquisition support services for non-inherently governmental functions. The selection is a single-award blanket purchase agreement with an 8(a) small business with a maximum value of about $77.5 million, the space agency said Wednesday.

NASA is seeking information on industry sources capable of providing information technology and professional support services under the third iteration of the NASA Research and Education Support Services contract vehicle. NRESS-III is an 8(a) small business set-aside indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract that provides support services for NASA's peer review life cycle processes consisting of the development and solicitation of proposals, proposal review and disposition of proposals prior to award, according to a notice posted Tuesday on SAM.gov.

RTX's Collins Aerospace subsidiary and partners ILC Dover and Oceaneering have completed the crew capability assessment test on next-generation spacesuits developed for NASA astronauts on the International Space Station. During the test, the spacesuits went through a series of demonstrations in a manufactured zero-gravity environment onboard an aircraft, RTX said Wednesday.

TRAX International will continue supporting NASA and several of its facilities under a potential $46.8 million contract extension. The company supports NASA's headquarters in Washington, D.C., Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland; Wallops Flight Facility and Langley Research Center in Virginia as part of the Goddard Logistics and Technical Information II contract, the space agency said Tuesday.

KBR has garnered recognition from NASA's Office of Small Business Programs for its successful collaboration with small businesses in support of the space agency’s objectives. The company said Monday it won the 2023 Large Business Prime Contractor of the Year awards at two NASA facilities, namely the Johnson Space Center and Goddard Space Flight Center.