NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) on Monday issued a solicitation seeking drone detection services to help it respond to and mitigate incursions from unmanned aircraft systems (UAS).
“The NASA KSC Flight Operations Office and NASA KSC Protection Services Office has a requirement for unmanned aircraft detection services that can accurately detect and identify unknown Unmanned Aircraft Systems out to a distance of at least 30km, be able to provide rapid and timely information to multiple users for response and mitigations at all times, and be fully compatible with the FBI UAS, procedures and protocols,” says the notice in the federal government’s beta.sam.gov business website. “The services provided by this acquisition will provide real-time detection capability for unauthorized UAS flights over and around KSC and will provide threat analysis of detections to provide NASA KSC Protective Services insight into developing and trending threats to NASA assets and personnel.”
Links in the notice to the Request for Proposals and Performance Work Statement are disabled except for qualified vendors and other interested parties.
Offers are due on Aug. 31.
KSC, located in Cape Canaveral, Fla., is NASA’s launch center for human flight operations with hundreds of facilities located on about 144,000 acres.
Airports, federal authorities, and critical infrastructure owners and operators in the U.S. are increasingly interested in counter-UAS systems to protect their facilities and assets from nefarious and sometime careless and clueless, drone operators.