I know that it’s old news, but this is the first time I actually sat down and listened to this hearing excerpt. Alan Grayson is an ass and a jerk, but I can understand his frustration with Bolden, who doesn’t realize that the Augustine panel made no recommendations, who doesn’t know what the word “commercial” means, didn’t know whether or not Flexible Path included Constellation (it didn’t necessarily), isn’t able to articulate what the plans are, and doesn’t generally seem to know what’s going on at all.
15 thoughts on “Why Space Policy Is A Mess”
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Bolden was the NASA Admin most of those guys wanted–they didn’t want someone who was eloquent and innovative, they wanted a Shuttle-hugging patsy. For all his faults, I have to give Bolden lots of points for having a spine.
~Jon
Bolden seemed to be outwitted by Grayson, and that doesn’t say much for either of them. The nation’s in the very best of hands.
Is this really the natural result of decades of unserious politics? Am I just imagining that our nation was led by adults back in the day?
“Now, I understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly here: We’ve been there before.” President Barak Obama April 15, 2010.
Words that will be remembered in infamy!
Yeah, I, too, actually enjoy and understand Grayson’s jerky bluntness here. He’s basically just asking a series of simple “whys” that Bolden is unable to succinctly answer in any non-wishy-washy way.
Rep. Grayson was being purposefully obnoxious, rude, and snarky today…wrote Keith Cowing
And if anyone would recognize “obnoxious, rude, and snarky”…..
The political powers that be have handed Bolden a set of numbers that do not add up and now grill and criticize him because the numbers do not add up…
I feel rather sorry for him. He does seem to be trying to answer questions honestly, fighting on, but he looks rather resigned to his fate. He looks destroyed. Everyone else has the control and he gets all the blame.
I don’t say many nice things about Mike Griffin, but if he was switched with Bolden at this hearing, I think he would have torn Grayson in half.
General Bolden is one of the most accomplished Administrators NASA has ever had. But he’s a military man in a job that demands skills the military cannot have. I don’t think he ever wanted the job, but took it because his CinC wanted him to. He’s being the best soldier he can be under the circumstances, but it’s just not something anyone could reasonably expect him to do as well as someone like Elon Musk would.
I’ve had some interaction with Bolden, and am impressed with the man. His handling of this hearing wasn’t all that bad, and I actually don’t think that Grayson’s was, either. I’ve been in that spot before, and know what it’s like to not be able to connect (on both sides). What this illustrates is the gulf in understanding that still exists between the Administration and Congress when it comes to NASA.
I’ve heard from some people that run in policy circles that Bolden is largely staying on at this point because Congress will go after Garver with a vengeance if he leaves. If he’d had his druthers, he would have resigned in February, but he knows his staff – especially Garver – would get blamed for OSTP’s political gambit.
That’s giving a whole lot of credit to officials who largely place the issue on the backburner. To be able to identify a Shuttle-hugging patsy, you have to at least be able to identify what the Shuttle is and isn’t. I’d wager no more than five or six Congressmen had a clue what that means beyond the recently appreciated impact on jobs in key districts, and certainly not when Bolden was confirmed.
That video was from back in Feb when no-one knew WTF was going on. It would have been nice if Bolden did, but hey.
Hey, I said it was old news, but in retrospect, it was clearly a presage of things to come.
This is a classic example of two people trying to be “too cute by half” in attempting to make their phony-baloney points. In Bolden’s case, it’s the attempt to pass off past efforts of monopsony contractors as “commercial” activity and in Grayson’s case it’s the attempt to brand the idea of grubby capitalists putting people in space as laughable on its face. Both ideas are dimwitted and counterfactual so watching this exchange again was oddly like a rerun of the Iran-Iraq War – a thoroughly repellant business all around and one in which neither party deserves to win, but in which I also cannot, for the life of me, decide who is the more deserving of loss.
Space policy is a mess for the same reason that foreign policy is a mess. The powers that control things like having hundreds of billions of dollars for corruptly allocated contracts to aerospace contractors in the defence and space industries. Which is why you find big campaign contributions and big lobbying fees when you look past the drapes even a tiny bit. Look at the FEC filings for any of your congress critters if you have doubts on this point.
General Electric has made so much money from the current crop of wars they bought the Weather Channel. Does anyone here wonder why all those private weather satellites that were proposed in the 1980s were never launched? Why dozens of private space ventures have gone nowhere? Why, even with his billions, Branson has yet to launch a single tourist despite his plans in 2004 to have tourist flights by 2007?
It has been 50 years since the technical challenges of spaceflight were first met. It has been over 40 years since men walked on the Moon. Why are there no destination resorts in orbit? Who benefits from having the policies the way they are?
Why is settlement of Antarctica off limits? Why is settlement of the sea beds or the high seas off limits? Why does the outer space treaty of 1967 prevent private property ownership in space? Who set this agenda to close off frontiers, and why? Who benefits?
Jim, I’m assuming the answer to your questions involves the saucer people under the supervision of the reverse vampires. We’re through the looking glass, here, people…