I agree. The Deep Space Gateway seems to have survived the transition, so I suspect that it will be too far along for the next president to cancel easily. Also, it looks like the next president will come into office with an SLS rocket that will need a mission, and there will be too much invested in lunar activities (DSG or lunar landing) to cancel easily. Congress may be further on board than they were for Constellation, and they refused to let that die. These are just some of the arguments for NASA to continue back to the Moon.

Private companies are getting serious about going back to the Moon for resources, so with or without NASA, US manned missions will likely be headed there during the ’20s. Congress and NASA are likely to be eager to tag along, if for no other reason than to save face. Mere private companies doing what an entire nation (and NASA) can no longer manage to do? How embarrassing.

It was only 15 years ago that only nations — and not many of those — were able to put a man into even suborbital space, now Blue Origin, Boeing, and SpaceX (and maybe Sierra Nevada) are on schedule to go beyond suborbital and into orbital manned missions, two of them before the end of this decade.

Commercial space is very innovative, and it is starting to move fast, rapidly catching up to — and sometimes surpassing — the capabilities of entire nations. If those nations do not make their own advancements quickly, commercial space will soon be king, and NASA, Congress, and other governments will be chasing them rather than the other way around.

I totally allowed myself to get sucked into that frame of mind, and it felt so ‘natural’ to do so, as-if it had always been that way. (It’s worse than I thought, and I expect calamity to befall us sooner rather than later.)

George Orwell – A Final Warning
https://youtu.be/JXm5hklbBsA
2:00

I recently read — maybe it was on NASA Watch — that the Democratic party leadership has decreed that all Democrats must oppose Bridenstine. Previous to that several Democrats were going to support him, more than offsetting the two Republicans (McCain and Rubio) opposed to him.

With McCain and Rubio opposed, the Bridenstine nomination would then have been a 50-50 tie with Mike Pence casting the tie-breaking vote before yesterday’s election. Now, Bridenstine will lose 49-51 if his nomination were to come to a vote.

With no other plausible contender for the post publicly identified, it’s quite possible former MSFC director Lightfoot will remain in the post indefinitely. That would lock in a major SLS guardian in the top spot at NASA. Without someone like DeWitt at treasurer, I doubt any other major reforms are possible at NASA either. The swamp knows how to resist.

Note: I didn’t expect Bridenstine to have cancelled SLS even if he got confirmed. But I do think he would have been able to peel off enough funding from it to establish a commercially based manned lunar program. Alas, it is not to be.

Wayne: To answer your question, the makeup of the audience does signal something in today’s Soviet-style Washington culture. In fact, that you ask proves how much like the Soviet Union we have become, in that citizens are trying to find out what is going on by analyzing such vague irrelevancies, just as was done in the Soviet era for the Soviet leadership. Their government representatives really don’t represent them anymore, so asking direct questions will rarely get you an honest answer.

I don’t follow this too closely & definitely don’t know all the Player’s, but –does the makeup of the audience at this event, signal anything, to those who are in-the-know? (or just pure PR?)

So. I expect the Senate, with its present make-up, will confirm Bridenstine before adjourning for Christmas, or early next year with maybe one or two Democrats giving him their blessing.

Well, that was quick. The Jones victory puts Trump’s NASA nominations in serious jeopardy and with it Trump’s overall NASA policy. Trump may still try to push through some changes with his FY19 budget, but it would probably have to be driven by OMB without anyone inside NASA championing it. That’s going to be tough.

The swamp wins again, alas.

If the above things happen we’ll have a pretty good idea of the direction things will go with the release of the FY19 budget request in February.

erkforbee: I am talking about manned spaceflight, which I think should have been obvious, especially because I was commenting on Trump’s space policy directive, which is also focused on manned spaceflight, not planetary missions.

Localfluff wrote, “He didn’t even appoint a new NASA administrator.”

You are incorrect. Trump has named a new NASA administrator. However, his pick must be approved by the Senate, which has not yet acted on his nomination.