Congress isn?t happy about SpaceX?s lunar lander and may vent this week

But he has repeatedly asked Congress for more funding so that NASA can support a second lander contract, either via the Biden administration's jobs and infrastructure bill or as a straightforward budget addition.That latter suggestion is the route recently taken by the Senate, which authorized the addition of $10 billion to NASA's budget as part of the Endless Frontier Act passed this month. 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. 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.