Small Business Is Winner With Station's High-Tech Initiatives

Houston, June 8, 1995 -- As prime contractor for NASA's international Space Station, Boeing is responsible for the design and development of the orbiting laboratory. Along with that enormous responsibility is another challenge -- to significantly include small, disadvantaged businesses as part of the contractor team.

To do this, an innovative initiative was developed by Boeing and its major subcontractors, Rocketdyne and McDonnell Douglas Aerospace, as part of a Small Disadvantaged Business (SDB) plan. The initiative served two purposes: to provide full integration of qualified small disadvantaged businesses, and to achieve NASA's 8-percent SDB requirement.

The international Space Station high-technology initiatives have defined a new standard for SDB participation. The results can be measured by the increase in the prime's SDB performance for the first half of fiscal year 1995 to 9 percent, or roughly $56 million.

"We set the stage to implement the most aggressive SDB plan in the aerospace industry today," said Kevin Howard, Boeing Small Business manager. "Our goal was to attain NASA's requirement regarding small business participation and that was a considerable challenge."

To communicate about these opportunities with the business community, a series of high-technology symposiums were held nationwide. The first symposium was held in Houston last November in conjunction with NASA's Small Business Trade Fair. The unique distinction of this event was that Boeing, McDonnell Douglas and Rocketdyne used it to present an estimated $80 million of procurement opportunities to the SDB community.

The second was held last March, in conjunction with Jet Propulsion Laboratory's small-business conference in Los Angeles.