Jeff Foust reports on the administrator’s testimony before the Senate:

“Do not confuse my desire for international collaboration for a willingness to rely on others for strategic capability,” he said in open remarks at a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee last week. Dependence on Soyuz “is not an option we would choose, but it is where we are today. In fact, we must seek an exception to the Iran Syria North Korea Nonproliferation Act because we have no immediate replacement for the shuttle and no other recourse if we wish to sustain the ISS.”

Given that statement, you would think that Griffin would be interested in accelerating domestic commercial options like COTS that would lessen or eliminate an reliance on the Russians. Yet, in his comments later in the hearing, he was not that interested in pursuing a crew option for COTS (also known as Capability D) on an accelerated schedule.

Yeah, you’d think. But I suspect that he fears that if COTS is seen to be making too-rapid progress, it will jeopardize funding for Ares/Orion, by making them seem superfluous. Of course, the traditional argument is that they are designed for the lunar mission, whereas a station crew transfer capability wouldn’t have that additional capability. And Orion is supposedly not just for going back to the moon but for use in a Mars mission as well (though it is never explained what its role is in such a mission). I can’t believe anyone seriously believes that a Mars mission would be performed in a glorified Apollo capsule–it’s simply too small, and the crew would go nuts. If it’s meant as the means to return them to earth upon return to earth orbit, well, OK, but it’s pretty pathetic to think that, seventy years after the first lunar landing, we would still be returning people to the planet in a capsule on a chute (particularly if they end up with a water landing).

Of course, the real danger is that we’ll get the worst of both worlds–a continuation of Ares/Orion, which are supposedly being built because they are necessary to go to the moon, but we drop the lunar mission from the policy, so they revert to simply replacing (or competing with) COTS crew capability. And unfortunately, as devoted Democrat Greg Zsidisin has discovered in a one on one, that seems to be exactly Obama’s plan. The only saving grace of it is that, in delaying the development by five years, it really means that the program will die. But it betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of space policy, and space hardware and development, on the part of Obama and/or his advisors. You can’t “delay” a program like this and have any hope that it won’t end up costing much more over the long run, particularly because you’ll lose many of the key personnel for it, who aren’t going to sit around twiddling their thumbs at no pay for half a decade while Obama solves the education problem. It’s really quite absurd. But then, most of his proposed policies are–one of the many reasons that he isn’t going to be elected.

As an aside, Jim Muncy said during the wrap-up panel last week in Phoenix that NASA has a bigger problem with the Iran Non-Proliferation Act than buying Soyuzes to replace Shuttle. Because the facilities are in the Russian segment, the ISS astronauts won’t even be able to use the potty if they don’t get a waiver, which could get pretty interesting on a six-month tour. The notion brought up the obvious jokes: “You’ll just have to hold it,” and “You should have gone before you launched…”

[Tuesday morning update]

Jon Goff has further thoughts:

…if you were a congressman or senator with a limited amount of money available, and you have two risky ventures to pick from to try and reduce the gap, what would you do? Would you place all your money on the one option where your money is going to be a relative drop in the bucket, and that even then has little or no chance of actually reducing the gap? Or would you invest at least part of your money in a much smaller program where it has a much higher probability of actually hastening the day when the US once again has manned spaceflight capabilities–and better yet, commercial manned spaceflight capabilities?

You do the math.

Unfortunately, the only math that interests most congresspeople is the number of jobs in their district or state, with “the Gap” a distant second place. Mike knows that, which is why he can get away with this stuff, or at least why he has to date.