This is rife with both presidential an congressional politics and pandering to Boeing and both Democratic and Republican senators with space relate corporations in their home states. Science isn’t even taking a back seat, science is in a trailer. From NASA rocket becomes Boeing’s latest headache as Trump demands moon mission in WaPo on Mar. 22:
Boeing senior executives arrived at NASA headquarters two weeks ago for what they knew would be a tense meeting. The rocket they’ve been building for NASA was behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Worse yet, there was no way it was going to be ready for a scheduled maiden launch in June 2020.
One estimate had the rocket launch as late as November 2021, and NASA’s leaders were furious, according to people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to be candid about sensitive negotiations. President Trump and Vice President Pence wanted NASA to pull off something big and bold with human spaceflight before the 2020 election: sending a crewless capsule around the moon in a precursor to an eventual return of American astronauts to the lunar surface.
But the latest delays would push the flight well past the election.
Bridenstine’s comments at the Senate hearing touched off a political maelstrom — angering Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.), the chairman of the appropriations committee and SLS’s chief benefactor. Critics say the latest machinations are yet another example of how political pressures have sustained the lucrative rocket program for years, as it has maintained Congressional support no matter how high the costs or lengthy the delays.
Obama killed Constellation in 2010, and directed NASA to aim for an asteroid and Mars instead of the moon. But the move once again angered Shelby, whose state is home to the Marshall Spaceflight Center, where much of the work on Constellation would have been based.
"The president’s proposed NASA budget begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,” he said at the time. “If this budget is enacted, NASA will no longer be an agency of innovation and hard science. It will be an agency of pipe dreams and fairy talks.”
Although the administration terminated the moon plan, it found it politically impossible to kill all of the projects already pouring billions of dollars into coffers of major aerospace contractors.