Portable Life Support System (PLSS) Welded Backplate

NASA/JSC has a requirement for a Portable Life Support System (PLSS) welded backplates that includes the development and production of all the materials, tooling, test equipment, test facilities, analysis tools, and labor required to iterate the design drawing, conduct a series of experiments to create a weld schedule for each unique instance of weld geometry, and to fabricate the welded plates. NASA/JSC intends to purchase from Arconic Incorporated. Arconic Incorporated is the only vendor to provide an approach of combining machining and electron beam welding to produce a titanium, embedded channel backplate. The backplate effectively becomes one large, complex manifold, enabling a unique ability for water lines to run underneath interfacing components in the smallest possible form factor, similar to a printed circuit board. The Government intends to acquire a commercial item using FAR Part 12. Interested organizations may submit their capabilities and qualifications to perform the effort in writing to Shine Lin at contact@example.gov not later than 4:30 p.m. local time on September 14, 2018. Such capabilities/qualifications will be evaluated solely for the purpose of determining whether or not to conduct this procurement on a competitive basis. A determination by the Government not to compete this proposed effort on a full and open competition basis, based upon responses to this notice, is solely within the discretion of the government. Oral communications are not acceptable in response to this notice. All responsible sources may submit an offer which shall be considered by the agency. NASA Clause 1852.215-84, Ombudsman, is applicable. The Center Ombudsman for this acquisition can be found at http://prod.nais.nasa.gov/pub/pub_library/Omb.html.