The House recessed today without dealing with the NASA authorization bill. Key quote:
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said votes on all bills were postponed until Sept. 29, when the chamber hopes to take up a stopgap spending measure, known as a continuing resolution, to keep the government running at present spending levels past Sept. 30, when the current fiscal year ends.
NASA administrator Charles Bolden is off to Saudia Arabia (and elsewhere) and here are some details about the trip.
Houston-area schools brace for impact of NASA layoffs.
You think NASA’s going get money this year or next? Or ever? In one graph (see below), this article shows how completely out of control federal spending has become, beginning in 2007, with no end in sight. Key quote:
Until this skyrocketing spending growth is arrested and reversed, we suspect that government spending has become disconnected from the ability of any American household to support it.
The Japanese effort to rent out their Kibo module on ISS for research has stalled, mainly because private businesses apparently consider the prices too high.
It appears that the NASA budget deadlock will remain stalled, at least until lame duck session after the November 2nd election.
A photo gallery showing the space shuttle Discovery’s last rollout from the VAB to the launchpad on Monday.
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.
Congress cuts the budget on a proposed military weather satellite system.
The space war continues. Here is another article outlining the political state of war between the House, Senate, and administration over NASA’s future. Don’t expect anything good to come out of these political shenigans.
