No one asked me to sign this petition, but I certainly would have.
[Update a few minutes later]
If I were petitioning the White House on space policy right now, I’d submit the following:
“The Commercial Crew program, which is the only near-term hope we have of ending our reliance on the Russians for transportation to the International Space Station, is being underfunded by the Congress, and delayed by a switch to an onerous new contracting method by NASA. We the undersigned request that the White House highlight the issue of the underfunding of the Commercial Crew program in the Congress, and issue an executive order to the space agency to continue utilizing Space Act Agreements for the program that have proven so successful in the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program, rather than shifting the procurement to the traditional costly FAR-based approach.”
[Update a couple minutes later]
Link is fixed now, sorry.
Link is to the Keynes article.
Why would they want you to sign this letter? Your blog is about how much you hate the Obama Administration.
Martin, Rand has time and again stated that while he abhors most of Obama’s plans and policies, in this case Obama has done the right thing. Rather than a mindless knee-jerk opposition to all things Obama, Rand, like me, prefers to actually *think* about issues and call them as fairly as he can.
The link goes to the keynes survey.
Good letter, and I agree with the policy it proposes, but many of the signatories have a direct financial stake in the policy advocated. To outsiders it’ll just look like another flavor of space pork.
The petition text you described might be a good candidate for a “We the People” petition:
https://wwws.whitehouse.gov/petitions#!/petition/create
They upped the signature requirement from 5k to 25k.
Okay, but they’re not saying that. They’re calling on Congress to instruct NASA to “use” commercial providers to transport crews to the ISS. Why would you want to support that?
People seem to think CCDev was just about serving NASA’s needs.. it wasn’t. The program was structured the way it was because NASA was helping the commercial industry develop and servicing the ISS was just an anchor tenant. Now that has changed. As the House representatives say every time they meet to discuss commercial crew, there’s no belief that a non-government market for transporting humans in space exists. The goal has changed, and so has everything else – the contract method, the funding level, and the political whims.
Trent,
That is exactly what happened with Shuttle.
I think Rand posted that WH petition text in response to me asking him for advice on a “We the People” petition that I was writing. Same basic ideas are put forth I guess, but mine focused more on funding for the program rather than regulations. I did mention the “oversight and regulations” as bad, but didn’t get too specific. I just posted it and if any of you would like to sign it, that would be great. Unfortunately the deadline is Dec. 9th so we only have a month to get those 25,000 signatures. If you agree with the petition (even if you don’t agree the petition has any chance of doing anything useful) please sign it and let your friends know about it.
Here is the link: http://wh.gov/boF
Here is the text if you don’t feel like going to the link just yet:
After the retirement of the Space Shuttle, the only way for Americans to get into space is to buy a seat on the Russian Soyuz. Our dependency on this “single point of failure” is simply unacceptable. Commercial companies are currently working with NASA and competing to provide these badly needed crew transportation services, but these initiatives are under threat from underfunding and the potential for increased oversight and regulations that are likely to increase costs and delay availability. This petition asks that you step up your support for these initiatives by going on record and telling Congress that fully funding the commercial crew program is the only path forward for a healthy space program.
But what good is fully funding it if NASA develops a horrible set of requirements? It will just make a bad situation worst by providing more incentives for the commercial firms to be assimilated by the NASA Borg that have destroyed basically every attempt at space commercialization in the last 40 years.
Space settlements and a commercial HSF industry will emerge, but it won’t be by NASA’s hand and the more you look to NASA to fund it, the further into the future you are pushing it.