[Satellite Today 12-16-08] Boeing Co. has filed a protest with the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) over Lockheed Martin‘s win of a $1.1 billion contract to build Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES-R) weather satellites for NASA.
    The decision to file the complaint was made, “only after careful consideration, and was based on our belief, in light of the information that has been provided to this point, that we offered a superior proposal under the disclosed evaluation criteria,” Boeing spokeswoman Diana Ball said in a Dec. 16 e-mail. The GAO is the investigative organization of the U.S. Congress and has the authority to review government acquisition actions and recommend corrective actions, including termination of improper awards.
    In response to the complaint, Lockheed Martin spokesman Gary Napier told Satellite Today that, "based on NASA’s thorough, fair and transparent acquisition process, along with the strengths of Lockheed Martin’s GOES-R proposal, we are confident the GAO ultimately will uphold NASA’s decision to award to Lockheed Martin."
    NASA, in coordination with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Dec. 2, selected Lockheed Martin Space Systems to build two satellites for NOAA’s GOES-R program.
    The first launch of the GOES-R series is scheduled for 2015. Data from the NOAA satellites will be used for weather forecasting and environmental, space and solar science.