>>13770452I don't know if they can because Congress controls the purse. I think, IRONICALLY, we got incredibly lucky with Kathy and the acting head of NASA during the Trump -> Biden transitionary period (and before BALLAST got made head), that someone having read the Starship HLS proposal went "shit, for $2.9Bn we can go to Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, Ceres & the Belt, Europa, ANYWHERE in the Solar system and the others are only giving us boots on the ground flag mission flying closets? Fuck that, we're greenlighting this baby to the stars."
If not for that one decision, we'd probably would have seen the NatTeam get most of the NASA award and we'd have another 20 years of Constellation/SLS 3.0 in HLS.
Undoubtedly, there's dozens of politicians that are absolutely livid to this day to the acting head of NASA and Kathy for awarding SpaceX with HLS to the Starship architecture. Kathy getting demoted under BALLAST is pretty on point with that retaliation behavior. I wish Bridenstine would have said "yeah, I'll stay on for the good of the American future in space" and kept leading NASA. Cause with BALLAST in charge, we're basically back to seemingly crony NASA that awarded failure while punishing success.
