NASA chief says cost-plus contracts are a “plague” on the space agency

arstechnica.com

30 points·rbanffy··6 comments

But super helpful to the various congress, senate, and state reps being paid by those contractors.

It is still mind blowing to me that “cost plus” contracts are a thing.

I have an idea: contractors get paid the agreed on amount and no more, if they can’t produce a product they can take their incomplete junk and return the tax payer’s money.

We often forget one of NASA's roles is to keep the space ecosystem and its supply chains well fed and ready to churn ICBMs when needed.

It’s also hard to predict costs on projects where there is zero stomach for failure. The SLS must be a spiderweb of redundancies.

SLS is a spiderweb of already built old engines that somehow cost lots of new billions

That’s great in situations with reasonably well-known products. It’s hard to imagine that working for the Apollo LM.

Cost-plus contracts have their place, but it’s a pretty niche one for really groundbreaking engineering.

overruns on a cost-plus contract are the procuring agencies fault, not the contractor. there is a thing called "oversight". cost plus contracts have to be managed. if they are not making progress, you stop paying them. "cost plus" means "agile". if you knew all the requirements (and they were viable), it would be firm fixed price.

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