As satisfying as this may have been to NASA and Boeing, it struck a dissonant chord with Congressman Earl Wilson of Indiana. Wilson questioned NASA's selection of Boeing's more expensive bid over that of the Hughes Aircraft Company which would have cost supposedly half as much. The Space Science Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, chaired by [84] Congressman Joseph Karth of Minnesota, joined Wilson and questioned NASA spokesmen extensively about their choice of Boeing. Despite their criticism NASA succeeded in convincing the Congressmen that "Boeing's proposal was selected because of its three-axis system rather than the spin-stabilized system suggested by Hughes."11
Although one approach was not necessarily better than the other, the three-axis system greatly reduced the technical difficulties involved in the photographic system. Moreover, the Boeing proposal had a far superior technical approach to obtaining the necessary photographic data and a greater inherent likelihood that it would reliably do just that. This had been the determining factor in the evaluations of the five bidders' proposals, Langley evaluators had employed the philosophy that the price of a proposal was secondary to the quality of the technical design and the management program which the bidder offered. In both respects the Boeing bid had been judged superior.