Many millions of Americans watched with rapt interest as the joint NASA and SpaceX project launched two humans up to the International Space Station in a Crew Dragon capsule perched on a Falcon 9 rocket last month – but fewer of those Americans are aware that besides SpaceX, there’s another private enterprise player in American space travel.
The most recent headlines show that Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), formally a subsidiary of Halliburton, won a $570 million contract with NASA to provide a range of services supporting continued American space travel.
“Under the contract, KBR will perform International Space Station payload operations and support the testing of NASA’s flagship space launch system,” write Reuters authors this morning. “NASA is leaning heavily on private companies built around shared visions for space exploration, as it gears up for a long-term presence on the moon and prepares for a manned mission to Mars.”
Features talking about this other instances of public-private collaboration in the sector show that KBR got into the space race in 2007, after its sordid history of involvement in American military conquest over the previous two decades.
Other highlights from KBR’s timeline include investigations into shoddy electrical work at U.S. bases, sexual violence claims by one of its employees, and a congressional inquiry into whether KBR received favoritism in government contract awards subsequent to the Bush/Cheney administration’s use of the firm as a contractor.
Although it may seem odd that such a company has become a sort of dark horse in America’s space program, KBR has cemented its involvement with NASA in some key ways.
“ Houston company KBR began with teams of wagons and mules to pave rural roads,” wrote Sergio Chapa at the Houston Chronicle last June, in a broadside exploring the trajectory of the firm over its lifetime. “Today, it’s helping NASA return to the Moon and put a man on Mars.”
As we see advances in the abovementioned planned American moon and Mars landings, these collaborations will become increasingly more important in the American technology and finance worlds.
