[Protest of NASA Rejection of Bid for Research]

B-245505, Jan 9, 1992

DIGEST: Where protester's proposal under broad agency announcement failed to include sufficient technical information to show viability of proposed research, agency reasonably determined that technical success was improbable and decision to reject proposal for funding was proper.

Attorneys

Herndon Science and Software, Inc.:

Herndon Science and Software, Inc. protests the rejection of its proposal under solicitation No. NRA-91-OSSA-1, issued by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) for planetary geoscience research proposals. Herndon principally argues that its proposal was improperly evaluated.

We deny the protest.

The solicitation, a NASA research announcement (NRA), is a form of a broad agency announcement (BAA) that NASA uses annually to solicit basic research on a competitive basis in furtherance of NASA's Planetary Geology and Geophysics Program (PG&GP). /1/ The NRA listed a number of research areas for which proposals could be submitted. Offerors were advised that their submission would be judged according to the following factors of approximately equal weight: intrinsic merit, relevance to NASA's objectives, and cost. Under intrinsic merit, the subfactors to be evaluated included "overall scientific or technical merit of the proposal or unique and innovative methods, approaches, or concepts demonstrated by the proposal." Cost was to be evaluated for realism and reasonableness.

NASA received 212 proposals in response to the NRA. Herndon's proposal, entitled, "Nuclear Fission Reactors as Energy Sources for the Giant Planets," was for research to examine the hypothesis that planetary nuclear fission "breeder" reactors account for the internal energy production in the giant outer planets. NASA conducted an external peer review technical evaluation, led by the Lunar and Planetary Geosciences Review (LPGR) Panel of the Lunar and Planetary Institute, with which NASA contracts for logistical support, and an additional NASA internal evaluation by PG&GP staff. At the conclusion of the evaluation, each proposal was placed in one of six evaluation categories: I-- excellent scientific merit, essential to the NASA program; II-- very good scientific merit, great importance to the program; III-- good scientific merit, useful to the program; IV-- fair scientific merit, useful to the program; V-- poor, not recommended for funding; and VI-- inappropriate for the program.

Herndon's proposal received a unanimous category V, i.e., poor rating, and was among the 18 lowest-rated proposals (of the 212 proposals submitted). Herndon's proposal was determined to contain two major technical deficiencies, both informational in nature, that led to its low rating. First, the technical evaluators, including the LPGR Panel's geophysics group, considered the information provided in the proposal insufficient to determine whether basic scientific concerns relating to "energetics," i.e., the transformation of energy, would be addressed by the proposed research. In this regard, the evaluators considered Herndon's proposed hypothesis on the origin of the internal planetary energy not likely to be scientifically viable under possible alternative physical conditions. /2/

/1/ Under a BAA, offerors who submit proposals are not competing against each other, but rather are attempting to demonstrate that their proposed research meets the agency's requirements. The issuing agency is under no obligation to award any contract. The agency may decide to fund those efforts and award contracts to those offerors who submit ideas the agency finds suitable. See Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Secs. 6.102(d)(2) and 35.016; see also Avogadro Energy Sys., B-244106, Sept. 9, 1991, 91-2 CPD Para. 229.

/2/ The evaluators considered the natural occurence or uranium to be too low to produce the excess radiation observed. Alternatively, the evaluators believed that, even if uranium and hydrogen existed in some concentrated form, reaction times would be too short lived to still provide excess giant planet heating today, millions of years after the "reactor" was assembled.