NASA Inspector Says Agency Wasted $80 Million On An Inferior Spacesuit (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When NASA began developing a rocket and spacecraft to return humans to the Moon a decade ago as part of the Constellation Program, the space agency started to think about the kinds of spacesuits astronauts would need in deep space and on the lunar surface. After this consideration, NASA awarded a $148 million contract to Oceaneering International, Inc. in 2009 to develop and produce such a spacesuit. However, President Obama canceled the Constellation program just a year later, in early 2010. Later that year, senior officials at the Johnson Space Center recommended canceling the Constellation spacesuit contract because the agency had its own engineers working on a new spacesuit and, well, NASA no longer had a clear need for deep-space spacesuits. However, the Houston officials were overruled by agency leaders at NASA's headquarters in Washington, DC. A new report released Wednesday by NASA Inspector General Paul Martin sharply criticizes this decision. "The continuation of this contract did not serve the best interests of the agency's spacesuit technology development efforts," the report states. In fact, the report found that NASA essentially squandered $80.6 million on the Oceaneering contract before it was finally ended last year.

Comments

One-sided article.

[Gravis Zero]

I feel like there is some information missing from this claim, particularly, the rationale for which NASA HQ decided to continue the contract. NASA isn't known for making illogical decisions, so it stands to reason that there is a logical explanation that is missing from this article.

Not wasted...

[cmseagle]

Someone in congress got to campaign on a fat contract that they brought back to their constituency! Same reason parts of the space shuttle were manufactured all over the country, even though it's not even close to the most cost-effective strategy.

This is not the outrage you're looking for

[Chelloveck]

So $80M over the course of about 6 years is $13.3M/year. Out of an annual budget of $18.4B. That's 0.07% of the annual NASA budget. Okay, so somebody made a bad decision. Reprimand them, do what you have to internally to avoid such decisions in the future, and let's move on. It's not enough that anyone outside of NASA needs to get their undies in a bunch over. If you're looking for government waste to be outraged about I'm sure you can find something orders of magnitude higher than a failed R&D project.