Jacquelyn Pletcher

Jacquelyn Pletcher serves as a secondary procurement professional within NASA Headquarters, supporting the agency’s mission to advance space and Earth science through strategic acquisition of research and development services. While not the primary contracting officer, she plays a critical role in facilitating the execution of complex R&D contracts, ensuring alignment with NASA’s technical priorities in planetary science, astrophysics, and heliophysics. Her responsibilities include coordinating acquisition planning, evaluating technical proposals, and supporting contract administration for high-value scientific and engineering services. She operates within a mission-critical environment where precision, compliance, and technical acumen are essential to securing innovative solutions that enable national space exploration goals. Her contractor relationships are characterized by engagement with leading research institutions, aerospace engineering firms, and independent scientific consultants specializing in physical and engineering sciences. While no single contractor dominates her portfolio, she consistently works with a broad ecosystem of qualified vendors capable of delivering advanced analytical tools, simulation software, instrumentation design, and data processing systems. Her working patterns reflect a collaborative, requirements-driven approach, emphasizing technical merit over vendor size or history, and supporting rigorous peer review and systems engineering standards. Pletcher’s procurement activity shows a 100% focus on open, non-set-aside acquisitions, indicating a preference for full and open competition based on technical excellence rather than socioeconomic preferences. This reflects NASA Headquarters’ institutional emphasis on mission-critical performance over socioeconomic targeting, though small businesses are not excluded—they compete on equal footing within a merit-based framework. Her primary procurement focus is exclusively under NAICS 541715, encompassing research and development in the physical, engineering, and life sciences. She procures advanced scientific services including computational modeling, spacecraft systems prototyping, sensor development, and mission-critical data analysis, supporting NASA’s most technologically demanding programs. Her expertise lies in bridging scientific requirements with acquisition execution in highly specialized, non-repetitive R&D domains.