The U.S. Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation into whether Boeing Co was given illegal instructions by the former head of human spaceflight at NASA during a lucrative lunar-lander contract competition, two people familiar with the matter said Friday.
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The Justice Department submitted submissions to NASA, Boeing, and Doug Loverro, who oversaw the brquee space travel program of the agency before he unexpectedly resigned in May as part of a grand jury inquiry into the alleged breach of federal procurement laws, the sources said.
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During a blackout time for the Human Landing System competition, one of the sources said, prosecutors are concentrating on contact between Loverro and Boeing space executive Jim Chilton in late January, in the probe launched in June.
Boeing and Loverro officials declined to comment. NASA declined to comment on personnel concerns and the status of any inquiry, but said that the agency was comfortable in its procurement process.
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The Wall Street Journal published earlier on the investigation.
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The inquiry, and an earlier NASA watchdog probe, has cast a pall on one of NASA's most ambitious endeavours: for the first time in nearly half a century, sending humans back to the moon from U.S. soil.
In April, NASA bypassed Boeing - an industry juggernaut with deep ties to space exploration - and awarded contracts worth a combined $1 billion to Elon Musk's SpaceX, Amazon.com Inc's founder Jeff Bezos' Blue Roots, and Leidos Inc's affiliate Dynetics to develop lunar landing vehicles that could take astronauts to the moon by 2024.
Boeing was excluded from the competition without knowing why, NASA said in April.
Two people briefed on an inquiry by NASA watchdogs told Reuters Boeing that the suspension had been about his interaction with Loverro.
The sources said the NASA Inspector General 's Office noticed that Loverro told Boeing that the company's proposal was incomplete during a blackout time and addressed missing aspects of the bid.
Boeing officials submitted another version after negotiations with Loverro during the blackout time, raising legal questions among agency procurement workers, one of the people said.
After less than a year in the role, Loverro unexpectedly resigned in May, telling staff in an email seen by Reuters that he took some "risks" to reach NASA's 2024 moon deadline.
"It is clear that I made a mistake in the decision for which I alone have to bear the consequences," said Loverro, without specifying the mistake to which he referred.