Just six months after the SKA Observatory Council approved the start of construction of the SKA telescopes, 27 contracts have been signed.
Worth approximately €90-million in total, the contracts have been awarded to all seven current SKAO members, namely Australia, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, and the UK.
The majority of awards have been for software development with additional early contract awards for professional services contracts. These expand the SKAO’s own engineering and management capabilities ahead of further construction work, as well as procuring early components and subsystems needed for the first arrays.
Over 60 top-level contracts
Teams are building on years and years of pre-construction design activity by partners all around the world that culminated in the production of the SKA Phase 1 Construction Proposal earlier this year. This thorough document of 256 pages stipulated the design baseline for the SKA telescopes, the work packages and construction milestones, as well as how member countries would benefit from their investment in the project by way of fair work return.
Building on those years of preparatory work and substantial financial investment in the design of the SKA, countries expressed interest in supplying specific elements in which they had expertise such as the antennas, the supercomputers, the networks, software, etc. This resulted in a model where most contracts would be allocated to specific member countries, while unallocated contracts would be offered to all members.
The result is more that 60 Tier 1 contracts placed by the SKAO. The majority are cash, where the SKAO is the client, while a few are in-kind, or paid for directly by countries. Below them sit Tier 2 contracts, placed between Tier 1 contractors and sub-contractors to deliver specific elements of the contract.
“There’s been a huge amount of work by teams within the observatory and across the partnership over time which has accelerated in the recent past to ensure industry-readiness as soon as we’d hit the go button,” explains Ian Hastings, SKAO’s head of procurement services.
The “go button” was the approval of construction by the SKAO Council at the end of June 2021, which thrust the SKA’s procurement process into its second stage: purchasing.
The first Tier 1 contracts were signed within a week of construction approval, thanks to the efforts of the teams upstream.
“Most of our construction contracts must be awarded in the first year to meet our ambitious construction schedule. And of course, going out to tender is where our procurement plans are tested ‘in real life’ for the first time,” says Andrea Casson, SKAO’s head of project management group.
“As a team, we have great momentum now, and the learning from these first contracts is being fed into the plans for the upcoming ones in a dynamic way.”
To ensure local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) around the telescope sites benefit from work, the SKAO has unbundled some of its larger infrastructure contracts, making them more accessible to local companies.
Another way the observatory ensures benefits trickle down to the local economy is with assessment criteria that reward bids outlining plans to subcontract to local companies, especially ones benefiting previously disadvantaged groups.
In the context of a global shortage of semiconductors and shipping issues, the SKAO is working to control its own supply chain. As an example, the observatory is bulk-buying programmable circuit boards it knows it will need to then provide them to contractors as raw material when they’ll need to assemble them.
The observatory is also looking at taking charge of shipping to its sites in Australia and South Africa. This could help the organisation lower its overall global maritime insurance policy by bundling all the shipping together rather than leaving it to each supplier. It would also allow the SKAO to better control its supply chain and ensure components arrive on site only when they are needed, thereby avoiding unnecessary storage charges and logistics headaches on site.
However, given the current global uncertainties, the observatory remains cautious in its outlook.
“While we’ve managed to overcome several challenges, some risks are clearly beyond our control, like a pandemic. Like every other business, we are impacted by the knock-on effects of such events and must adjust our schedule and delivery accordingly,” notes McMullin.
Hitting the ground on site
With six months having passed since the start of construction activities, the SKA Observatory has already allocated more than two dozen major contracts, learning and adapting along the way to meet local expectations and factor in global challenges.
2022 will see major infrastructure work being allocated and starting at the two telescope sites. Five big infrastructure contracts – worth together over 100-million euros – are currently open for tenders.
Many of these are to ensure that things such as accommodation, power, access roads, emergency airstrips as well as radio and fibre optical communications are in place for the work on site to begin.
By the end of 2022, the observatory will have awarded approximately 85% of its Tier 1 contracts, and committed more than 500-million euros of construction funding.
In 2024 the first array assembly milestone – deploying four dish systems in South Africa and over 1 000 low frequency antennas in Western Australia – will be reached.