I’m reading through it now, and will probably have something up later, but it strikes me that if the final bill looks like this, it will be vetoed. I would consider a CR preferable if I were NASA.
3 thoughts on “The NASA House Authorization Bill”
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I had been expecting and hoping for a CR and I was astonished Obama suddenly appeared to cave in. I never understood why he came out with such a radical budget request to begin with (my guess is that he allowed Garver to pursue her agenda for a while) and now I don’t understand what made him change his mind so suddenly. I suspect a deal was done on an unrelated matter Obama does care about, but I have no idea what that might be.
Someone over at NASA Watch suggests Obama did not cave in at all, given that Garver was the only one to comment on it and that she said no more than that it was a good starting point. I hope this is true, but I’m not convinced. I’m afraid Obama will stop pushing for his original budget proposal.
On reflection I think the more radical points in the House bill are negotiating tactics, designed to wring concessions out of Obama if he wants commercial crew.
I wonder what the mechanics for this bill are. Is it really true that a single senator could stop this as a standalone bill as Jim Muncy has claimed? And could Harry Reid stop this (say because Bigelow whispered something into his ear) if he wanted to even if Obama no longer cared very much?
“Is it really true that a single senator could stop this as a standalone bill as Jim Muncy has claimed? ”
That was in the committee and it has already cleared the committee or at least is about to with unanimous consent. If a single senator could stop an authorization bill on the floor, Obamacare would have been a total non-starter as it was an authorization bill.
That said, the House bill goes too far the other way. I
too think it is a ”Buy this magazine or the Dog gets it.” tactic.
Sausage making at it’s finest!
When a major argument for commercial crew transport to ISS is that Boeing and its partners can deliver such by 2015, one has to wonder if admiration of the private sector is over-inflated, at least if the current performance of this aerospace giant in delivering at more earth-bound transport is any evidence.
Cited in THE HUFFINGTON POST: “Boeing’s most important initiative of the last decade, the initiative on which the company’s future was to be based, is the 787 Dreamliner. Troubles with product sourcing and the assembly and manufacturing process caused Boeing to miss the August 2007 launch of the aircraft. Another delay was announced in October 2007 due to supplier and fastener problems. Yet another delay was announced in January 2008. There was another in April 2009, partly due to labor problems. The launch was delayed two more times, and now, nearly three years later, the 787 has yet to be delivered to customers. The company disclosed this week that the release date of the plane may be pushed back again to early 2011.
The Dreamliner project was one of the largest design and manufacturing programs by any industrial company in the world over the last ten years. It has been an unmitigated disaster.”
And we really think that this kind of “effective/efficient” delivery of transport systems is preferable to government-owned launch vehicles? The gaps between Boeing’s promise-vs-delivery on the Dreamliner and NASA’s promise-vs-delivery gaps on Constellation/Orion don’t look all that dissimiliar. If that’s the case, the House of Representatives approach to human space flight may be turning fewer of the keys over to the Russians than imagined…or, at least fewer of the keys than the private sector is willing to admit.