[mlindner]

The issue on Congress's side though is they can't just give money to a company outright. They'd hit all sorts of other laws preventing that.

[meepmorp]

There's plenty of ways to pressure/coerce NASA that are totally legal and easily covered for as due diligence.

They can change the budget in the next cycle to specify that NASA must add another contractor as a secondary for risk mitigation reasons. They can haul the administrators in front of committee and throw a bunch of concern around to cow NASA into revisiting its decision.

[jacquesm]

They can do all of that but none of that will make up the technical gap between SpaceX and Bezos' hobby horse.