SLS behind schedule? Increase the budget. Commercial Crew behind schedule? Cut the budget.
And of course, Commercial Crew is not in fact behind schedule. If NASA is hedging its bets by buying Soyuz into 2018, that’s because, for good reason, it has no confidence that it will get the needed funding. So Congressional actions become self fulfilling.
“The committee aide suggested NASA could solve its commercial crew funding shortfall by diverting funding from Soyuz seats.”
Frankly, this is rather tempting.
And then when the committees start whining when there are gaps in U.S. crew presence on the station, tell ’em you’re just following their advice.
Otherwise, I fear we’ll need to wait for a loss of crew on a Soyuz, or some other failure that grounds Soyuz for a really extended stretch of time, before Congress wakes up.
Well…perhaps they can still get some of the shortfall made up in reconciliation.
Wait, you actually buy that bullshit about Commercial Crew not being behind schedule? Of course it’s behind schedule.
The CCrew schedule slipped because Congress keeps underfunding it. NASA said it themselves in their own reports.
What I wonder is if they think Orion will be used to transport crews to ISS. The real answer is “no,” and Charlie Bolden has said that numerous times in congressional hearings. Orion/SLS would certainly never be used for that (and not just because it is never, ever going to fly). So all I can think is that they are writing off ISS. But until we figure out how to get it out of orbit safely (an unsolved problem), we can’t even do that. They are putting us on a road to disaster.
Orion/SLS would certainly never be used for that
It would be the equivalent of using Royal Caribbean’s next Oasis-class mega-cruise ship to make runs from Dover to Calais – and scrapping the ship after each run. You’d have to wait years for it to be ready, and it would be massively expensive overkill for the job.
So we’re left to decide whether the congressional staff is really that ignorant, or really that desperate to come up with ways to use SLS/Orion.
Isn’t it obvious that this govt. failure is just part of the total failure of govt? Our govt. is one of the most stable in the world but it isn’t going to last. It can’t at this level of corruption. The question is how long a dark age will we suffer before the next age?