NASA's secret weapon in the lunar space race may be ... procurement reform?

What has impressed Gold most about NASA’s strategy since announcing the Moon Base in March, at the Ignition event, has been the agency’s evolving procurement strategy. The space agency has adopted a flexible procurement strategy similar to one used by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

There are two components. NASA has largely used a mechanism called Broad Agency Announcements, which ask for a capability such as providing power on the surface of the Moon. This allows NASA to ask industry for ideas without being too prescriptive and levying a bunch of requirements. It’s rather like instead of telling industry precisely what it wants, NASA asks industry what it can do.

Critically, Gold said, the space agency has also used a DARPA-style preliminary proposal process. In response to a traditional procurement, interested companies would prepare a detailed proposal, often running dozens, if not hundreds, of pages. This required an extraordinary amount of time.

With the Moon Base, NASA is employing a two-step process. After NASA announces the need for a service, interested companies submit a short white paper describing their solution. After a short review, NASA identifies the concepts it wants to pursue further, and only then do companies invest the time and resources to prepare a detailed proposal.

Gold said several lunar opportunities interested Redwire, and the company submitted initial proposals in response. But it only had to prepare a full proposal for opportunities that NASA wanted to pursue, including using a variant of its roll-out solar arrays on the Moon to generate power.

“We were able to focus the lion’s share of our resources in what the agency really wanted and what we were best at,” he said.

An all-hands-on-deck approach

From this shift, it seems clear that NASA is trying to move away from micromanaging every individual lunar-base subsystem and instead seeks to coordinate independently developed commercial capabilities. The space agency is sourcing them from everywhere, from major contractors like Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Northrop Grumman to relatively new startups such as Impulse Space, ispace-US, Voyager Technologies, Quantum Space, and more.