quote:

Dynetics challenges two significant weaknesses assigned to its technical proposal relying in large part on extra-proposal information. As noted above, however, the protester’s contentions relying on extra-proposal information are meritless. These contentions manifest in many of Dynetics’s challenges to the agency’s evaluation. First, Dynetics protests the agency’s assignment of a significant weakness for the proposal’s failure to reasonably substantiate the claimed mass reduction opportunities necessary to close the deficit between the mass estimate for Dynetics’s proposed integrated descent/ascent element (DAE) and the current flight dynamic mass allocation.

[Here is the sick burn] In order to enable a rocket to lift off from a launch pad, the action or thrust of the rocket must be greater than the mass of the rocket it is lifting. See “Rocket Principles,” NASA, available at https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/k-12/rocket/TRCRocket/ rocket_principles.html (last visited July 25, 2021). In this regard, overweight vehicles may not be able to execute the mission and could incur significant cost and schedule impacts associated with necessary redesigns. See AR, Tab 56, Dynetics Proposal, Vol. IV, attach. 33, Risk Reports, at 14044.