What makes Wednesday's hearing before the House intriguing is that key US Representatives have signaled that they will not follow the Senate's lead. As part of its version of the Endless Frontier Act, the House Science Committee skipped authorizing funds for a second lunar lander. A US Representative from Seattle, near where Jeff Bezos' Amazon and Blue Origin companies are based, offered a stinging rebuke, telling The Wall Street Journal, "If Jeff Bezos wants to explore space, that’s great, but I don’t think he needs federal dollars."So it seems clear that the House will not just throw more money at NASA for a second lunar lander. At the same time, the House is fairly hostile toward SpaceX and commercial space. The chair of the House Science Committee, Dallas Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson, said she was "disappointed" after NASA selected SpaceX as its sole provider of a lunar lander in April.
WILL EBJ GET HER WAY?
Johnson's opposition was not a huge surprise. Last year, she and then-US Representative Kendra Horn issued a joint statement expressing concerns about NASA's plans to rely on a "commercial" provider for a lunar lander. NASA wanted to issue a fixed-price contract for the lander instead of a cost-plus contract. NASA explained that it had used fixed-price contracting as part of its Commercial Crew program, and it proved to be a cheaper and faster method. The agency seemed justified in this, as SpaceX Crew Dragons now safely ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station.
However, many in Congress have opposed this approach. They cite a desire for NASA to have more "oversight" over these contracts as a rationale for favoring cost-plus contracts. Yet an often unstated rationale likely has more sway over Congress. Under a cost-plus contract, Congress retains some control over who gets space jobs and in which states. Under fixed-price contracts, these decisions are left up to the contractors themselves.
Here is Johnson, in 2020, expressing her concerns about funding the lunar lander with a fixed-price contract: "The multi-year delays and difficulties experienced by the companies of NASA’s taxpayer-funded Commercial Crew program—a program with the far less ambitious goal of just getting NASA astronauts back to low Earth orbit—make clear to me that we should not be trying to privatize America’s Moon-Mars program, especially when at the end of the day American taxpayers, not the private companies, are going to wind up paying the lion’s share of the costs."
Given this backdrop, Wednesday's hearing, called to discuss NASA's budget request for fiscal year 2022, will be worth watching. Nelson's goal will be to secure some funding for Artemis, as he would like to have some competition to spur the program forward.
Johnson, meanwhile, is likely to be unhappy. After Congress appropriated so little funding for a lander in last year's budget, NASA said, 'Fine, we'll take the lowest cost option,' which was SpaceX. To make things worse, from her perspective, NASA ignored her preferred solution for going to the Moon, which was to bypass the commercial lander approach entirely. She supports the SLS rocket, the Orion spacecraft, and big government space programs that supply a lot of jobs. She made this clear during a hearing in 2016, when the prospect of using lower-cost commercial vehicles for space exploration came up.
“To all those NASA and contract employees I would simply say, Congress supports SLS and Orion,” she said. “And we will continue to do so no matter what."
Related:
SpaceX: 2021-05-21 With ULA’s new rocket Vulcan behind schedule, Space Force agrees to let Atlas 5 fill in
SpaceX: 2021-05-20 Boeing's massive attack on SpaceX and Pro-SLS - claiming they will be the first to the moon and Mars. The hell with SpaceX
SpaceX: 2021-05-20 Congress attacks Musk for Bezos!
SpaceX: 2021-05-21 With ULA’s new rocket Vulcan behind schedule, Space Force agrees to let Atlas 5 fill in
SpaceX: 2021-05-20 Boeing's massive attack on SpaceX and Pro-SLS - claiming they will be the first to the moon and Mars. The hell with SpaceX
SpaceX: 2021-05-20 Congress attacks Musk for Bezos!