HAVE SPACESUIT WILL TRAVEL

I worked for many years at a Systems Command where we farmed out research and development and procurement dollars to both industry and the government's labs. With industry we wrote a Statement of Work and held the contractor to it in so far as deliverables were concerned. The deliverables required the production of Test Articles or Low Rate Initial Production and Full Production items and included monthly, quarterly and annual progress reports, 50% Design Review, Critical Design Review, 90% and Final Design Review and an accurate schedule for the full phase of the period of performance with project milestones and everything else necessary for successful project management included such as procurement of long lead time articles, government furnished equipment, software, etc and the full range of required military specifications to be met/satisfied.

In contrast, we just forked over X$ every year to our government lab with none of the above and were unsurprised when they failed to perform, meet schedule and always went over budget on materials, manpower and everything else including travel. I thought SPAWARSYSCEN was bad but I never worked with NASA and their lab mindset, such as it is. Here is what they say about their inabiliity to land on the moon in 2024.

The OIG conducted the audit because, "The development of new spacesuits is a critical component of achieving NASA's goals of returning humans to the moon, continuing safe operations on the International Space Station (ISS), and exploring Mars and other deep space locations," the report reads. In the audit, inspectors "examined the extent to which NASA is addressing challenges related to cost, schedule, and performance of the next-generation spacesuit system."

Spacesuits currently in rotation among astronauts on the space station were designed 45 years ago for NASA's space shuttle program, and it is critical that NASA develop new suits for the safety and efficiency of future space missions and programs, the audit notes. And so, for the past 14 years NASA has been developing this next-gen replacement.

However, obstacles along the way in developing these suits could put NASA's ambitious moon plans on hold; one main obstacle being budget.

"We reported in 2017 that despite spending nearly $200 million on extravehicular spacesuit development over the previous nine-year period, the agency remained years away from having a flight-ready spacesuit to use on exploration missions. Since our 2017 report, NASA has spent an additional $220 million — for a total of $420 million — on spacesuit development," the audit reads.

However, while NASA aims to invest $625.2 million more into the development of these suits, bringing the grand total to over $1 billion, the OIG still thinks that NASA cannot meet its current hopeful schedule of a 2024 lunar landing.

In addition to a multitude of budgetary concerns, the audit shows that this schedule includes about a 20-month delay in designing, verifying and testing the suits as well as creating two "qualification suits," a demonstration suit for the space station and two lunar flight suits.....

In the agency's proposed new strategy outlined in the RFI, NASA would be "shifting acquisition of the exploration extravehicular activity (xEVA) system to a model in which NASA will purchase spacesuit services from commercial partners rather than building them in-house with traditional government contracts," the statement reads.

In the final paragraph you see a reference to taking the matter out of the hands of the dolts in the lab who have probably spent $300,000,000 trying to figure out what color the suits should be before they move on to figuring out the tricky differences of working out the plumbing for all 93 genders who they expect to launch at the moon.