OK, we lost the fight in committee, but now the bill goes to the full Senate. As noted here, individual senators actually can throw a wrench in the works, because there is a preference for unanimous consent. So now you don’t have to have a senator on the committee to fight the good fight — anyone with a senator or two (that is, any USian voter) can call one or both of them and try to fix this before the floor vote.
6 thoughts on “The Next Commercial Crew Battle”
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If you haven’t already, contact SpaceX. They’re such busy little beavers that they don’t hear about this stuff until it is too late.
I’m pretty sure SpaceX has professional representation in DC these days. I’d be shocked if they weren’t warned of this well before we spotted it. That’s why those DC guys make the big bucks after all.
Whatever they’re (presumably) trying to do about it seems to be non-public. They’re already involved in one public DC fight; I might guess they prefer to avoid opening a second front right now. No way to know for sure though.
Mind, if they *were* taken by surprise by it, maybe they’re sending the wrong people money. As an old friend recently observed to me, this working to protect billionaires’ rocket companies for free takes a seriously flexible sense of humor.
At the end of next year Space X launches a manned Dragon 2 from its Texas site. If its a success the resulting favorable publicity will have a good chance of heading off any adverse reaction by the Feds. A big riisk for sure, but something has to done to halt this particular act of porkish treason. I vaguely remember that Von Braun and company thought of doing a unapproved satellite launch back in the late 1950s before Sputnik or just afterwards.
As for the linked article, Shelby does not mean well, he knows exactly what the consequences of his actions are. Marshall is his personal fief and he intends to protect it at any cost-cost to the nation that is.
Michael,
The paperwork with the FAA AST for doing launch from Texas will take longer than that. They only just reached the point where environmentalists are able to start suing them to save the “fill in the blank”.
http://www.brownsvilleherald.com/news/local/article_941ac362-e93e-11e3-b1d5-0017a43b2370.html
Mitigation steps key to minimizing effects of rocket launches
[[[Scott Nicol, conservation co-chair for the Lower Rio Grande Valley Sierra Club, said there is no good way to develop the land SpaceX is considering for its launch operations and maintain the integrity of the sensitive ecosystem in and around Boca Chica Beach.
“It’s a bad place to put anything,” he said. “There’s no way to completely avoid causing damage to the area.”]]]
They could try flying from their current site, Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, but they would need the permission of the USAF, and they may not want to anger NASA.
Really, there best bet to be free of NASA in human spaceflight would be to launch from Spaceport America. It was originally designed to be a orbital launch facility (I worked with the original group promoting it in the 1990’s) and there are a number of safe corridors to orbit that were mapped out by the folks at WSMR who have been firing rockets into WSMR from Utah for decades with only a couple of mishaps (i.e. vehicles impacting outside the range…)
A bonus with using Spaceport America is they would be able to recover their first stage by doing a vertical landing on land which would allow its reuse.
Sorry, I know about the bureaucratic hurdles. I just became incensed at the obvious stupidity and moral treason displayed by Shelby and the rest of our august (the real one would have sent them all to the arena) political leaders.
A number of us speculated a while back what the political effect would be if one day a SpaceX cargo capsule showed up at Station, the hatch opened, and a SpaceX employee emerged with a clipboard saying “can I get someone to sign for these packages?”
A risky tactic, as you say – potential for great positive publicity, but it would terminally humiliate and anger Old NASA and its support coalition. (Then again, it’s hard to see how they could behave that much worse than they already are.)
As for Senator Shelby’s true intentions, perhaps so, but it’s often wise to pretend a political opponent means well regardless of circumstantial evidence otherwise. “Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.”