A look at the Washington Post’s take on the space war
The Washington Post today includes an excellent article outlining quite succinctly the mess that’s resulted from the space war between the House, the Senate, and the administration over NASA’s manned program. Key quote:
In an effort to restore a NASA consensus and fund future human space travel, negotiators from the House and Senate have been meeting frequently in recent weeks. Participants say, however, that the sides are dug in and that stalemate is a real possibility.
As I have been saying for months, don’t expect anything good to come from Congress, even if they come up with a compromise. Obama and NASA under Bolden did a very bad job selling their ideas to Congress, and Congress returned the favor by rejecting those ideas and instead coming up with two different plans, both of which serve their own parochial interests rather than the nation’s. The result is a micromanaged mishmosh that won’t get anything done, while wasting huges sums of cash that the federal government does not have.
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No doubt that the Obama administration did not put up a fight that equaled the opposition. They may have been naive as to how much their proposed changes affected key districts or interests, and felt the merits of what they were proposing would win over.
I think the biggest problem that they didn’t anticipate was that with the Shuttle program already coming to an end, and with the Constellation money becoming freed up, there had to be a political fight for redistribution of the money. And if politicians do anything well, it’s fight for money.
In light of that, I don’t know if there would have been anything the administration could have done to prevent a huge fight, but they certainly could have done a better job in affecting the outcome.
I think his big mistake was trying to appease them with the promise of a HLV. He just set himself up for WHEN, WHERE, WHAT. If instead he had said we are going to build Pete Wordon`s True Space Ship to go to the Moon and Mars and we are going to get him and a teem to start designing it right now. It would have been a different story.
>…If instead he had said we are going to build Pete Wordon`s True Space Ship to go to the Moon and Mars…
Assuming they ever heard of Pete Wordon and could even guess what a “True Space Ship” would be.
I think Griffen’s insistence that the only way you could do anything beyond LEO is with a HLV kind of locked out anything else. Congress does seem to want to get NASA out donig something, adn sadly trusted Griffin’s edict that only HLV’s can do that.