An op-ed from Bill Nelson and Kay Bailey Hutchison:

The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 gave us the blueprint — a way to move forward with human spaceflight and to continue exploring the next frontier.

It extended the life of the International Space Station from 2015 to 2020 and eased NASA resources away from the end of the shuttle program and toward commercial spaceflight and NASA-led development of a heavy-lift rocket for deep-space exploration.

The blueprint we ushered through the Congress last fall also will help reduce the economic impact of the shuttle’s retirement. We made every effort to boost the aerospace industry and take advantage of an extremely skilled NASA work force. We also were able to avoid huge cuts at a time when Congress is slashing across the board.

While NASA and America’s space program are in a time of transition, one thing that most people can agree on is the need to press forward with human space exploration. Our country’s commitment to exploring space is a key in keeping the United States at the forefront globally of science and technology. Space exploration and a deeper understanding of how we can best utilize the great unknown is also vital to our national-security interests.

Translation: we don’t really know what “exploration” means, or how to do it, but we managed to keep the bacon flowing to our own states and those of our buddies. We’re also going to continue to claim that building a giant rocket for which there are no funded payloads is critical to national security, even though we have no idea in what way this might be true. And we’ll take credit for commercial spaceflight, even though we’ve been bad mouthing it for a year and a half, because we merely underfunded it, whereas the House wanted to zero it out altogether.

I hope and think that Nelson will lose his election next year, and Hutchison isn’t running again. I won’t miss either of them.

[Update a few minuts later]

Here’s a summary of a panel discussion in Orlando last week, on which Nelson sat. I have to say that he does sound like he’s come around on commercial space. But he’s still likely to lose, for reasons having nothing to do with space policy. I also think that Dale Ketcham overestimates the importance of space policy to the Florida electorate. They’ll be much more concerned about ObamaCare, Medicare and other issues.