[Satellite News – 3-18-08] The deadline for proposals to build the spacecraft for the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites-R series (GOES-R) program passed March 11, with Northrop Grumman, Boeing Co. and Lockheed Martin submitting bids to build the environmental monitoring spacecraft.
    Teams led by the three companies had been working on GOES-R proposals under contracts from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which oversees the program to develop a pair of next-generation spacecraft that are intended to provide weather warning products as well as foster economic growth and promote educational research.
    NOAA hopes to award the spacecraft contract by the end of the year, but notes that the agency does not currently have the money they need in the budget. “It’s a very long process of review and approval,” said Greg Mandt, NOAA’s GOES-R system program director. “The process won’t be done until the end of the year.”
    In its fiscal year 2009 budget request, NOAA requested an increase of $242.2 million for the program for a total of $477 million, Mandt said. The agency projects a total cost of $7.6 billion for GOES-R, including all development costs, manufacturing the two spacecraft and 10 years of operations.
    NOAA expected to award the system development contract in August, but cost overruns and other problems forced the agency to scale back program requirements. Mandt said the agency has changed the way it estimates costs for the program.
    “As we were going through these studies with the contractors we were projecting what the costs would be,” Mandt said. “It has only been in our estimating process that the prices have changed. A lot of that is reflected in the fact that so many satellite programs are having cost overruns that people are questioning how people are estimating costs. In the middle of what we were doing, in the middle of us estimating what this was going to cost, we changed many of our assumptions. We said, ‘Let’s budget at 80 percent confidence rather than 50 percent. Let’s use more realistic inflation numbers. Let’s be more conservative in software development efforts.’ When you start doing all those assumptions that are much more conservative you project that costs are going to be higher. But what we’re doing is instead of projecting a smaller cost and when you run into problems asking for more money, we’re saying here’s a more realistic cost and we’re saying we can manage within in that envelope and we’ll cut things out rather than exceeding that.”  
    Proposals for the ground system contract will be due in May, and that contract is expected to be awarded in early 2009.