Senate’s NASA budget bill may hamper commercial spacecraft makers

A flown SpaceX Dragon capsule.

Megan Geuss

Back when it was still flying its own vehicles, NASA primarily relied on contractors to maintain and operate them. The agency's current plan takes this approach a bit further, paying private companies a fee for service to take materials and, eventually, people into low-Earth orbit. SpaceX and Orbital Science are already taking cargo to the International Space Station, and three companies—Boeing, SpaceX, and Sierra Nevada—are currently receiving money to develop crewed vehicles.

But this plan doesn't have uniform support from Congress, and the Houston Chronicle's Eric Burger has found that one of the Congressional detractors has slipped wording into a NASA funding bill that could potentially derail the whole process. Richard Shelby (R-AL) has added a small clause that would require all the competing companies to engage in a specific form of cost tracking. Doing so is far more easily dictated than done, based on this description of the accounting methods.

Boeing, as a regular government contractor, already has a system in place for tracking costs in a compatible manner. The other two companies, however, do not and would have to face the costs of adding it. Berger also suggests that the new requirement might force the entire contracting process to be repeated.