Boeing and Orion Propulsion Sign NASA Mentor-Protégé Agreement

The Boeing Company and Orion Propulsion Inc. (OPI) have signed a government-sponsored Mentor-Protégé agreement to work together on NASA’s Ares I rocket, which will transport astronauts into space after the space shuttle retires. The one-year agreement was signed today at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and marks the first Mentor-Protégé agreement in 2008 in support of a major NASA contract.
The NASA-sponsored Mentor-Protégé Program pairs large companies with eligible small businesses to enhance the protégés’ capabilities and enable them to successfully compete for larger, more complex prime contract and subcontract awards. Boeing has a long history of helping small and diverse businesses. The company subcontracted more than $5 billion of work to small and diverse businesses in 2007.OPI is a small, woman-owned aerospace company located near Marshall Space Flight Center in northern Alabama. It provides propulsion engineering, test, verification, qualification and production expertise to NASA as well as to several civil, defense and commercial partners. OPI currently supports Boeing on Ares I reaction control system (RCS) development. Potential future activities include integration of flight hardware, production of test equipment, tooling and provision of technical-support services. The RCS includes multiple small rocket engines and their supporting subsystems to provide control over the orientation of the Ares I (first stage and upper stage) during its ascent to orbit.
Boeing is under contract to NASA to produce the Ares I upper stage and instrument unit avionics. It will build the upper stage at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans in late 2009.

Source: Frintier India