This week members of the House of Representatives are trying to steal away your space frontier future, just to preserve the Space-States’ status quo. Contrary to the White House’s request and recommendations of the Augustine Commission, Representative Bart Gordon’s proposed NASA Authorization Bill slashes commercial space by 95%, reducing it to $250 million over 5 years instead of the proposed $6 billion over five years. The House version of the “NASA Irrelevancy Act of 2010″ also adds extremely heavy restrictions to commercial crew spending, designed to delay the program’s start.
Congressional ostriches seem willing to sacrifice practical, innovative exploration today for the possibility of Apollo-redux tomorrow. Friends of commercial space, now is the time to call Chairman Gordon, as well as the other members of the House Science Committee, to say, “Please restore the President’s funding level for commercial crew, have the House Committee postpone a vote, and go back to the drawing board to put together a sustainable plan that makes sense for NASA and the nation!” The Committee Representatives’ phone numbers are listed below.
My congressperson isn’t on the committee, but if yours is, call them.
Spasibo, House authorization committee. The Russians will love you.
If this monstrocity goes through, I already have a name for the new HLV they want built. Let’s call it the “Utopia”, which derives from the Latin for no place or no where. It’s a fitting name because this will be the Rocket to Nowhere. They’re wanting to spend billions developing it but have not allocated anything for any payloads associated with the rocket other than the Orion capsule itself. These two systems and the required cast of thousands required to launch them will absorb so much of NASA’s funding there won’t be any money to actually build the equipment needed to fly anywhere. Maybe that’s the goal all along – build rockets that are too expensive to fly and have no destination but that require maintaining the workforce “just in case.” It’s the aerospace equivalent of digging a hole in the ground and filling it in over and over just to keep people busy and employed.
While we’re at it, we may need to define a new unit of funding measurement when talking about government space systems. I propose the term SX (SpaceX) with a value of about $500 million. That’s the reported amount spent to date by SpaceX for everything they’ve done developing the Falcon 1, Falcon 9, Dragon capsule, and all of the required manufacturing, launch and support infrastructure. From the numbers I’ve seen so far, they’re allocating about 20 SX for development of Orion and the HLV. Given NASA’s history, before all is said and done, the price to taxpayers will likely be much, much higher.
I propose the term SX (SpaceX) with a value of about $500 million.
I beat you to that by about 3 months, although I had deemed 1 SpaceX to be the equivalent of $250 million, but that is negotiable 😉
http://www.transterrestrial.com/?p=25992
Hey guys, it doesn’t really matter now. Granted NASA will be forced to waste billions of taxpayer money but SpaceX has Falcon1 and Falcon 9 and the Dragon capsule and Bigelow has his blow up space station. Boeing has a capsule for commercial use that they say is designed to launch from Delta, Atlas or Falcon9. The cards have been tossed in the air and have already come down in favour of commercial stuff.
Congress has already lost the bet. Guess where a cash strapped NASA will go for service and support- commercial suppliers. Of course the congress will try to impede that but then someone will cry ; “National Security, National Pride, this, that and everything else” but commercial will win in the end. It is now to far along for it to be stopped.