The U.S. Air Force released a solicitation for proposals for its $4.79 billion NOVASTAR contract vehicle for services in research, development, and sustainment of hardware and software capabilities to support intelligence production requirements of the service branch, Department of Defense (DoD), and the intelligence community.
According to the solicitation, the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) plans to select six small business vendors for the multiple-award indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity (IDIQ) contract. The proposed IDIQ contract will be worth up to $4.79 billion over its 10-year term, and will consolidate roughly 25 separate contracts under one larger acquisition vehicle. The NASIC also requires contract support for intelligence production through collection, planning, processing, analysis dissemination, and archiving.
The solicitation has four focus areas: research, development, sustainment, and production. In terms of research, vendors will be asked to do various tasks like investigating, examining, prototyping, verifying, and documenting. In development, vendors will concentrate on systems and software engineering, analysis, installation and deployment, and hardware documentation. Vendors will also examine preventative, adaptive, and emergency maintenance in the sustainment focus area. And finally, in production, vendor duties include tasking and collection, processing, and dissemination.
This solicitation comes almost a year after the service issued a request for information for the NOVASTAR program on May 29, 2020. All proposals are due by Aug 31.
