NASA Budget Hearing Today
House Science Committee Hearing: A Review of the President’s Fiscal Year 2022 Budget Proposal for NASA
10:00 am EDT
Witness: Bill Nelson
Watch live – House – NASA
Congress isn’t happy about SpaceX’s lunar lander and may vent this week, Ars Technica
“NASA Administrator Bill Nelson will appear at a committee meeting of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee on Wednesday, and the meeting could be full of intrigue when the subject of NASA’s Artemis Program to land humans on the Moon and SpaceX comes up.”
Just now…Congressman Jamal Bowman (NY) …” We got to the moon without private contractors..” Some homework needs to be done!
hashtag North American Aviation, Grumman, McDonnell, etc…
it is odd how congress seems to think contractors building to NASA specs on bloated cost plus contracts is perfectly acceptable, but contractors being given some freedom to innovate on the design and held to firm fix price is bad. guess it is all about slush funds for lobbyists and not making real progress with exploration.
Like it says in the article, it’s mostly about Congress controlling which people get the money. With fixed price, the contractors build wherever they want…and that takes away power from Congress.
Which is why they’ve been trying to starve out fixed-price contracting ever since NASA started emphasizing it for pointy-end-of-the-stick projects.
“…you can only get so many pounds of potatoes out of a five-pound sack.” — NASA Administrator Bill Nelson
I didn’t think I was going to like him. 😉