Teledyne Brown Engineering’s newest contract set to expand International Space Station

Huntsville based Teledyne Brown Engineering revealed late last week that the company has been awarded the Marshall Operations, Systems, Services and Integration II (MOSSI II) contract from NASA. The contract is a performance-based, cost-plus-award-fee contract with a potential mission services value of $596.5 over eight years.

As the prime contractor for MOSSI II, Teledyne Brown is now responsible for the management, personnel, supplies and equipment to support the International Space Station (ISS) and its missions. The news comes after a very lengthy application process that lasted around four years according to Teledyne executives. 

A subsidiary of Teledyne Technologies Incorporated, Teledyne Brown has a surplus of experience when it comes to working with NASA on the ISS and other space initiatives. In fact, it was the first high-technology firm established in Huntsville, Alabama to assist Wernher von Braun and his rocket team in developing the Redstone Rocket. 

The company has previously supplied over 175,000 hours of round-the-clock support for the station over the past 20 years. Teledyne Brown played a major role in supporting NASA’s science research aboard the ISS by integrating more than 3,000 payloads, providing crew training activities for these payloads, developing experiment procedures, and delivering real-time support to science teams from around the world.

“Our team’s dedication to Marshall Space Flight Center, the International Space Station and NASA’s mission to explore space is undeniable,” stated Scott Hall, President of Teledyne Brown Engineering. “Our talent, experience and understanding of the multifaceted parameters in payload operations and console support have contributed to the success of the ISS program and we look forward to working on MOSSI II and future space programs.”

The company’s prior work with the ISS comes from their incumbent status on the Mission Operations and Integration (MO&I) portion of the same contract. MOSSI II is a combination of the current MO&I and Huntsville Operations Support Center (HOSC) contracts. It consists of all phases of ISS operations including mission preparation, crew and flight controller training and real-time spaceflight operations, as well as maintaining support infrastructure.

Work will be performed on-site at Marshall and other locations as required including NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston and Kennedy Space Center in Florida. In addition to the base contract value, MOSSI II contains a maximum potential indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity value of $85 million. In an interview with the Huntsville Business Journal, Teledyne Brown’s Vice President of Space Systems Reggie Spivey explained the IDIQ contract portion as funds to support other tasks that are not included in the original core of the contract.  

“We expect that there will be other missions in the future that haven’t been planned yet such as commercial space stations with NASA payloads or work with the lunar base,” he explained. “Within the next 10 years, the work on this contract could expand to other things besides the ISS.” 

When asked about how long Teledyne Brown Engineering has been working on procuring their newest contract, Spivey stated that it was a lengthy process.  

“Oh goodness…..we’ve been chasing this for a while. In total it was over four years,” he stated. “It was a long procurement process that we’re ready to get behind us and move along with the mission.”