The helmet camera of astronaut Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper shows her tool bag as it floats away from the International Space Station. She lost hold of it when when a grease gun inside it exploded. NASA/Associate Press.
by Frank James
Who knew that with a pair of binoculars you could see a tool bag flying through space in earth orbit? And this tool bag is turning out to be for NASA what the $400 hammer was to Pentagon as a symbol of insane overspending by a government agency.
Because this tool bag with a few commonplace tools in it cost NASA $100,000.
Mark Matthews and Robert Block of the Tribune write about how NASA spending ways are being examined by Obama's transition team as a way to try and get some of those cost cuts the president-elect is looking for in order to help pay for his health-care plan.
Most nights it's possible to look skyward with a pair of cheap binoculars and see a $100,000 mistake circling the Earth. The glowing object -- an orbiting NASA tool bag -- was lost last month by an astronaut during a routine spacewalk.
The canvas-and-acrylic caddy contained two grease guns, a scraper, a trash bag and some wipes, hardly cutting-edge technology. So why did it cost $100,000?
NASA officials said they had no answer to that question -- beyond the fact that, as spokesman Allard Beutel put it, "space flight is expensive." That expense is drawing serious scrutiny from the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama.
Of 74 questions submitted to the agency by Obama's NASA transition team, more than half asked about basic spending issues, including cost overruns.
