There’s a story at the LA Times. Not much new, but I thought that this was worth a comment:
Logsdon said he believed the skepticism about Obama’s support for manned flight was “misguided” from the first. The comment about taking money from NASA was made by a junior campaign aide, he said.
I’m disappointed in Professor Logsdon. His own comment is more than “misguided.” It’s disingenuous, and in fact false, though I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and just assume that he’s unfamiliar with what actually happened, and was told this by someone else (though he should be following it closely, being a premier expert on space policy and all…).
It wasn’t merely a “comment” from a “junior campaign aide.” He says this as though it was just an aside on background. No. It was the official position in a white paper at the campaign web site. Jeff Foust described the history of the Obama space-policy shifts, and their ongoing nebulosity, back in August.
If Senator Obama didn’t pay any attention to it at the time (we know how much trouble he has getting good help) and he’s since reversed it (and he seems to have) that’s great, but I see no point in whitewashing the history of what happened. It was an area of legitimate concern for space (or at least NASA) enthusiasts at the time, and it does provide legitimate cause to question how deep his enthusiasm is now. His supporters might claim that he had a road-to-Damascus moment, and now talks about how excited he was by Apollo growing up in Hawaii, but he was talking about that prior to the “funding education by delaying Constellation” time period as well.
I remain an agnostic on the degree of support of this president for either space, or NASA. Only the future will tell.
I will say this administration is giving some lip service manned spaceflight, with Obama calling the crews of the last two space shuttles. For the first call, they actually brought kids in from a local magnet school for aerospace technology. The amount of money in the bailout/buyout/sellout compared to other programs was telling, however.
Agree that what Bolden’s nomination means for The Future of Manned Spaceflight is To Be Determined. Amusing bit of business in the Times story, though, about possibly-soon-to-be-Shuttle-deprived American astronauts having to “beg rides on Soviet rockets.” (emphasis mine)
Some more of that world-class fact-checking and editing prowess for which the MSM are so renowned! Or maybe just a twinge of that old Lefty nostalgia for better times.
I love manned spaceflight, but the best thing that could happen to it may be a massive budget cut, ISS extension, shuttle extension + COTS-D. It’s about the only way I see to get NASA to abandon its policy of waste and overreach. Commercial competition and impossibility of shortcuts may force them into an incremental path that establishes a transport infrastructure. Let’s have commercial players chase them to L1! 🙂
IIRC they closed the SSME production line. That puts pretty much a damper in any Shuttle extension plans.
The DIRECT people seem pretty confident it can be restarted. Of course they need SSME if they want to turn their rocket into anything but an oversized LEO launcher. It will be interesting to see what they have to say about this in their DIRECT 3.0 presentation today.
Another factor is ET production and I’ve heard conflicting reports on that.