Via Mark Whittington, here’s a more detailed description of yesterday’s space policy hearing than Keith Cowing’s truncated summary. It’s not quite as bad as Keith made it sound, but it’s still chock full of conventional “wisdom,” (scare quotes to indicate that I don’t find it particularly wise). I found Mike Griffin’s quote interesting:

“NASA costs each American 14 cents a day. A really robust program could be had for about 20 cents a day,” Griffin said. “Americans spend more on pizza then they do on space.”

Well, Mike, there’s a really big difference between pizza and NASA. When people pay for pizza, they get to eat it, so maybe it’s not shocking that they’re more willing to spend their money on it.

In addition to that point, there’s another fallacy here, and I’m working on a column about fallacies of space advocacy, spurred by the SF writer’s panel at last week’s Space Frontier Conference, which abounded with them.

But, speaking of Mark Whittington, I’ll also note that, in contrast to his absurd caricature of the position of advocates of alternate space programs in the comments section here, I would have had some interesting things to say had I been called to testify, and I think that I may sit down and write up some congressional testimony, should that unlikely event ever occur.