What has most impressed Gold about NASA’s strategy since the lunar base announcement in March, during the Ignition event, has been the evolution of the agency’s procurement strategy. The space agency has adopted a flexible procurement strategy similar to that used by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
There are two components. NASA has made extensive use of a mechanism called Broad Agency Announcements, which calls for a capability such as delivering power to the surface of the Moon. This allows NASA to solicit ideas from industry without being too prescriptive and imposing many requirements. It’s almost as if, instead of telling industry precisely what they want, NASA is asking them what they can do.
Critically, Gold said, the space agency also used a DARPA-style preliminary proposal process. In response to a traditional public procurement, interested companies would prepare a detailed proposal, often lasting dozens or even hundreds of pages. This required an extraordinary amount of time.
With the Moon Base, NASA uses a two-step process. After NASA announces the need for a service, interested companies submit a short white paper describing their solution. After a brief review, NASA identifies concepts it wants to explore further, and only then do companies invest the time and resources necessary to prepare a detailed proposal.
Gold said several lunar opportunities were of interest to Redwire, and the company has submitted initial proposals in response. But he only needed to prepare a comprehensive proposal on the opportunities NASA wanted to exploit, including using a variation of its solar panels deployed on the Moon to generate electricity.
“We were able to focus most of our resources on what the agency actually wanted and what we were best at,” he said.
A participatory approach
From this shift, it seems clear that NASA is trying to move away from micromanaging each lunar base subsystem and instead seeking to coordinate independently developed commercial capabilities. The space agency sources them everywhere, from major contractors like Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Northrop Grumman, to relatively new startups like Impulse Space, ispace-US, Voyager Technologies, Quantum Space, and others.
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