Jeff Foust has a report on the debate in Boulder between Lori Garver and Walt Cunningham. As I note in comments, if Senator Obama is now interested in prizes, that would be a change of position from when he criticized Senator McCain’s proposal for an automotive prize.

Chris Bowers: on why “progressives” should support space programs. There’s a lot of typical mythology in the comments section about NASA and the military, and spin-off. We would have had PCs without Apollo, honest. We needed microchips for the missiles, which was at least as big a driver.

That’s what Ferris Valyn wants Barack Obama to do.

It’s good advice for John McCain, too. I don’t think that it will have any political effect on the election if he does it now, though. Space simply isn’t a voting issue for very many people.

Very little in this essay is new to people who have been following the arguments in space policy circles for years, but it’s useful to pull it all together into one place, and bring it up to date. I and many others have long advocated that we need to resurrect NACA (which was absorbed into NASA half a century ago) and start developing technology that can support private industry, as we did for aviation. With the new private space passenger vehicles now starting to be developed, the time is ripe for it, and Jeff Foust and Charles Miller have made a very powerful case. This should be must reading for both presidential campaigns.

[Update mid morning]

This piece I wrote a few years ago on the centennial of flight seems pertinent.

[Mid-afternoon update]

More commentary over at Jeff’s site, Space Politics.

As current blog readers know, I’ve been pretty much of an agnostic as to which candidate would be best for space policy (at least in terms of actually advancing us toward becoming a spacefaring society). But I just saw a very interesting rumor over at Space Politics. The post is about whether McCain likes Mars, and was influenced by reading The Martian Chronicles (which are not, contrary to common belief, science fiction, but rather fantasy, like much of Bradbury’s work).

But the rumor is in comments, from two separate commenters:

My understanding is that Craig Steidle is formally advising the McCain campaign, and may be determining McCain’s NASA policy…

…Admiral Steidle has also adopted an EELV-based approach for Shuttle replacement, albeit with the Orbital Space Plane (OSP). I think it would be very easy for him to embrace an approach using a downsized Orion/CEV on top of an EELV.

The Admiral had a very forward focused program that didn’t play favorites with any of the NASA centers, particularly Marshall. This ticked off several of the congressional delegations. But I have a feeling that the Alabama contingent may not hold as much sway over the upcoming years.

It’s interesting that you brought up the Admiral here. I’ve heard rumors from several sources that he would be the likely NASA Administrator if McCain is elected. Unlike the current Soviet-style Design Bureau Culture at NASA, Steidle is a believer and practitioner of good old American free enterprise and competition.

Steidle was in charge of the VSE before Mike Griffin came in (O’Keefe was much more hands-off as an administrator, particularly because he wasn’t a rocket scientist, and didn’t pretend he was). Mike Griffin essentially tore up everything that Steidle was doing by the roots, and instituted his own plan. So while Steidle is hardly perfect, he’ll be a big improvement, and get the program back on track as it was when he left, with the loss of three years or so. If this rumor is true, for this reason alone, McCain now looks like a far preferable candidate to Obama, in terms of space. Of course, for me, and many others, space remains a lower-priority issue. But it does provide a reason to vote for McCain (as opposed to against Obama), which I’ve been having trouble coming up with.

This sounds like an interesting session. I hope that Glenn is taking good notes. I’d expect Jeff Foust to post something on Space Politics as well (in addition to an article in The Space Review on Monday).

It may be the first time that representatives from all three campaigns have been on a single dais for this subject. We’ll see it they can pin the Obama guy down on how expects to fund education with the space program without throwing a wrench in the works with a delay (and how he addresses the dreaded “Gap”). And why he wants to wait until after the election to have a national dialogue on space.

I know Lori, but I’ve never heard of the other two.

[Update on Saturday at noon]

Here is Jeff Foust’s report, with more to come on Monday. As I would have guessed, the only people up on the issues were the moderator and Lori. I think that it says something about Obama and his campaign that he doesn’t have an adviser for this subject (or perhaps science and technology at all).

I’ll be on The Space Show on Sunday afternoon at noon to 1:30 PM PDT, talking about space and politics, and whatever.

…why I am a libertarian, but not a Libertarian:

In a column in today’s Sarasota Herald-Tribune, Billy Cox notes that Hoagland’s presence stands in contrast to efforts by Libertarians to tone down UFO talk within their ranks. Joe Buchman, running for Congress in Utah as a Libertarian, told Cox that state LP officials are “fuming” over Buchman’s push to declassify records that he believes would prove evidence of… well, something to do with alien life. “At least I won’t be the biggest nut case at the convention now,” Buchman said upon learning of Hoagland’s talk.

The party does tend to attract a lot of nutballs. I can’t take seriously a party that takes Richard Hoagland seriously enough to feature him at its convention.