NASA has selected A-P-T Research Inc. of Huntsville, Ala., to provide mission assurance, engineering and risk assessment services at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The maximum potential value for the four-year cost-plus-award-fee Safety and Mission Support Services II (S-MASS II) contract is $36 million. A-P-T Research Inc. will perform the mission assurance, engineering…

    NASA has selected a team led by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corporation of Boulder, Colo., for a technology demonstration of a high performance “green” propellant alternative to the highly toxic fuel hydrazine. With this award, NASA opens a new era of innovative and non-toxic green fuels that are less harmful to our environment,…

NASA has selected the Norwegian Space Centre of Oslo, Norway, for combined data support services for NOAA’s Joint Polar Satellite System Program. This is a firm-fixed price contract with a value of about $22 million, which includes one base year and four one-year options to extend performance. This contract permits usage of the Svalbard Satellite…

NASA is exercising an $80.5 million flex option on the Facilities Development and Operations Contract with Lockheed Martin Corp. of Gaithersburg, Md. The level-of-effort flex option takes advantage of hours that were negotiated for the contract award in 2009 and increases the ceiling for the base contract period. The period of performance for the contract…

NASA has selected three small businesses to provide access to a variety of program support services for the agency’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Under the Marshall Integrated Program Support Services blanket purchase agreements, the following companies will lead teams to compete for task orders:    Manufacturing Technical Solutions Inc., Huntsville, Ala.  Sumaria…

NASA is seeking proposals for small satellite payloads to fly on rockets planned to launch between 2013 and 2016. These miniature spacecraft, known as CubeSats, could be auxiliary payloads on previously planned missions. CubeSats are a class of research spacecraft called nanosatellites. These cube-shaped satellites are approximately four inches long, have a volume of about…

President Barack Obama told the flight control team for NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover, “You made us all proud,” Aug. 13. Obama telephoned the mission control room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., to congratulate JPL Director Charles Elachi and the Mars Science Laboratory team operating the rover, which landed on Mars a week ago….

NASA has completed negotiations and finalized the contracts for the spacecraft and instruments that comprise the Joint Polar Satellite System-1 Satellite, NOAA’s second next generation operational polar-orbiting satellite, planned to launch in 2017. JPSS-1 will follow the Suomi National Polar-orbiting Partnership (Suomi NPP) satellite to maintain continuity of weather and environmental observations. The final contract…