This anti-business piece is sort of a mess:
Indeed, legislation has been proposed in Congress since the UAG was formed that promotes the Council’s professed goals of expedition, streamlining, and commercial dominance, and it enjoys bipartisan support from lawmakers representing “states and districts where aerospace technology plays a significant role in the local economy,” according to an analysis from Daily Kos. This shared financial interest has brought together far-right, anti-science legislators like Ted Cruz and Lamar Smith in co-sponsorship with Democrats from states with aerospace-heavy economies. [Emphasis mine]
The premise is that space is supposed to be about science, but that has never been true. And as Mark Whittington pointed out on Twitter, it wasn’t Ted Cruz or Lamar Smith who were running ads blasting their opponents for supporting a mission to Europa.
The person whom Rand refers to is Rep Lizzie Fletcher who overthrew John Culberson. She is now on House Science despite the fact that she has been compared to William Proxmire (and not just by me.}
I suppose it was inevitable that some such cretin would appear; Proxmire has been out of office 30 years and dead for about half that long. The wonder is that no one else had taken over his schtick before now. Nature abhors a vacuum and ecological niches like to be filled.
Proxmire was always a bully and a poseur. He went after obscure little six- and seven-figure projects – mostly science – whose principals were academic nobodies who had no friends at court and couldn’t fight back. He never went after anything in his home state or important to any of his 99 colleagues or big enough to really represent a serious abuse of the taxpayer.
But Democrats, of course, have always been the Party of Science, not Farm Belt yokels like those icky Republicans. And we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.
Fletcher’s victory margin was not large. Perhaps she will wind up a one-term wonder after the 2020 election so long as Beto O’Rourke isn’t the Dem presidential nominee. His presence on the TX statewide ballot in 2018 is the only reason Fletcher got elected in the first place.
So, what do people think about Mike Griffin’s latest stances?
https://spacenews.com/space-development-agency-to-be-part-of-griffins-defense-research-organization/
I think that if Mike Griffin can stand up a DARPA-like Space Development Agency that eschews cost-plus and FAR for military space projects I will happily take him off my list of Wastes of Space and install him in an honored spot on my Space Roll of Honor.
If only Proxmire were alive to endure Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.
I suppose she would be happier if all the new space high tech jobs being created by commercial space would be better if china got them…