Spacecraft engineering, software, research and development services

This is a presolicitation notice in accordance with FAR Subpart 5.2. 

The Naval Center for Space Technology (NCST), located at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC, is the designated lead laboratory for Navy space programs. NCST has the primary responsibility to develop space systems, spacecraft payloads, tactical communications, and aerospace systems, and to actively pursue emerging technologies in an effort to advance space, tactical, and aerospace system development. Over the past 25 years the NCST has developed, enhanced, and maintained a collection of software used for design, development, test, launch, and mission operations of DoD space assets. This NRL-owned software is constantly being enhanced to provide state of the art solutions to space applications. The core suite of software components are used in all aspects of the spacecraft or component life-cycle.

This requirement will involve research and prototype development of spacecraft electronics and space/airborne electronic systems, as well as the continued maintenance, development, enhancement and testing of the NRL-owned software that support the development, test, launch, and mission operations of DoD space assets. The primary support areas include:

•    Neptune™ Software - The contractor shall provide engineering development, maintenance, enhancement and configuration management support for all components contained within the Neptune™ software suite, which is a government-owned suite of software tools that provides a set of reusable components that facilitate the development of command, control, and monitoring applications used for spacecraft, component development, integration & test, and flight operations. 
•    Ground Station and Mission Operations - The contractor shall operate ground station and spacecraft command and control at NRL, NRL field sites and other remote locations, including the continued development and enhancement of the supporting ground system software components: the Neptune™ software suite; ground system control; mission unique software; satellite specific software; data reduction and analysis; task generation system; COTS integration; and remote tracking systems.
•    Spacecraft and Payload Integration and Test (I&T) - The contractor shall provide I&T architecture used in the design and development of command and telemetry processing, testing of hardware specific interfaces, and test procedure development from box to system, and utilize the Neptune™ software to develop these systems that satisfy the requirements of full spacecraft development, acceptance testing and pre/post launch processing and analysis.
•    Real-time Embedded Software - The contractor shall develop real-time embedded flight software components for both the spacecraft bus and application specific payloads and experiments.
•    Virtual Mission Operations Center (VMOC) Software - The contractor shall provide software engineering development, maintenance, enhancement and configuration management support for all components contained within the VMOC™ software framework, which is a government-owned software framework that provides a set of reusable components to provide satellite mission management services, including collection requirement management, planning services, scheduling, and real-time operations.

NRL intends to negotiate a cost-plus-fixed-fee term form contract utilizing the procedures of FAR Part 15, and as a total small business set-aside under North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code 541715.  

The anticipated solicitation release date is 03 December 2019. A draft RFP and some of its key documents are attached for reference and planning purposes, but is subject to change.