Washington Post Reports NASA/Boeing Call is Subject of Grand Jury Investigation

Latest News

Logo atop Boeing headquarters. Photo: Boeing.

Boeing’s bid to build a spacecraft capable of flying NASA astronauts to the moon didn’t meet NASA’s requirements, and the company was going to lose out on a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

But NASA was worried that the corporate giant would protest the contract award, potentially holding it up for months at a time when the space agency was trying to meet a White House mandate to get astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024.

So in February, Doug Loverro, then the head of NASA’s human exploration directorate, called Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing’s space and launch division, to explain that the company was going to lose the contract and to inquire whether it would file a challenge, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.