Go read this action alert, and call your senator if they’re on the appropriations committee.
11 thoughts on “Dick Shelby, Putin’s New Pal”
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Go read this action alert, and call your senator if they’re on the appropriations committee.
Comments are closed.
Well, I made my local call just before 17:00, and got it out on the ORL5 mailing list, with phone numbers for Senator Merkley, so that I can hope that more Oregonians will give their office a heads up before 10:00 East Coast Time tomorrow. I did point out that they will have to call between 5:00 and 7:00 Pacific Time to be certain they get to the Senator’s office in DC before the markup starts.
So what happened today?
The predictable.
Shelby’s PAC makes major contributions to Committee chair Barbara Milkulski. You can figure out the rest.
One of my senators (Lindsey Graham) was on the list. Left a voice message at his office at about 6:30 PM EDT.
Shelby won, the language is in. So much for “commerce” in space, then
So what happens with SpaceX if Shelby has succeeded in pricing them out of the NASA (and USAF??) market? Can they keep going with nongovernmental contracts?
They would have to reorganize around different revenue streams, and at this point it could mean actually pretty significant restructuring within the company – because they must have hired a bunch of people just to deal with government as a customer.
Also, they really really need to actually start to bring in revenue from commercial customers, so far the actual flown commercial flights are minuscule part.
That would put a serious damper on any hopes of opening up new revenue streams like passenger flights, they would need to seriously focus on existing revenue streams.
Actually their biggest problem will be rebuilding good will with their commercial customers like Mr. Bigalow and the biotech firms as they pushed them aside to focus on the rich pickings from NASA. The DragonLab for example was supposed to fly in 2011 and its anyone’s guess when it will actually fly. The same is true for Mr. Bigalow. BA has been in a holding pattern on the BA330 since CCP distracted SpaceX. I think it was a good sign he was at the unveiling of Dragon 2.0
How many disappointed customers does Dragonlab have?
So much for “commerce” in space, then.
That depends on what you mean by space commerce.
Commercial space originally meant private enterprise — private companies selling goods and services to private customers.
“NewSpace” lobbies like SFF and PoliSpace decided that was an “obsolete” paradigm. They proclaimed that the only Politically Correct way to do space was through “public-private partnerships” (what we used to call “government contracting”).
It is the “NewSpace” NASA-contracting paradigm that’s failed. Now, it’s time to go back to the traditional type of commercial space, as advocated by G. Harry Stine, Robert Heinlein, etc., which has been largely ignored for the last 10 years.
Edward,
Yes, the New Space Contractor advocates forgot that the government replaced fix price for cost-plus contracting in WWII because of fears private firms would be profiteering by cutting corners on quality. And it should have been no surprise that the Congress critters will do what is needed to protect the pork flows to their local NASA facilities.
The late G. Harry Stine was right in 1982 when he wrote his famous essay “Kill NASA Now,”that the quickest way to get to build a commercial human spaceflight economy was replacing NASA with a tax credit program. Who knows where we would be today if the space advocate community has listened to him. This latest attempt to include NASA in the critical path to creating a commercial human spaceflight economy has only delayed ventures like Bigalow Aerospace’s BA330 and created once again the impression in the business world that human spaceflight is hard and expensive.