House Outlaws Obama's NASA Intervention 209
TopSpin writes "NASA's Constellation Program and Ares rockets appear to have strong support in Congress. An appropriations bill passed by the House includes language that bars 'any efforts by NASA to cancel or change the current Constellation program without first seeking approval of Congress.' The Administration's appointed NASA leadership is being publicly hostile towards its traditional aerospace affiliations. As Charles Bolden put it to industry execs, 'We are going to be fighting and fussing over the coming year,' and 'Some of you are not going to like me because we are not going to do the same kind of things we've always done.'"
It won't be law without Obama's Approval (Score:2, Interesting)
From http://www.rules.house.gov/POP/approps_proc.htm [house.gov]:
Re:Oink! Oink! (Score:3, Interesting)
Check your assumptions, that's all Bolden's been asked by his boss to do, you should too.
Re:Military-industrial complex fights hard (Score:3, Interesting)
Where have you been? The first salvo was fired even before Obama was sworn in. That would be when he persuaded Defense Secretary Robert Gates (who used to literally count the days until he was replaced [thinkprogress.org]) to stay on. I've often wondered how and why Obama did that. My best guess is that they agreed on an agenda of cost cutting and procurement reform [foxnews.com].
When Gates announced his program, the defense special interests fought back — hard. And yet they lost. Mind-boggling, but true. Now that's change I can believe in!
I'm all for space travel, but I want to see the same thing happen at NASA. Anybody who really believes we're going to start a moon base and travel to Mars using Apollo-style space capsules is fooling themselves. The program is pure pork, USDA approved.
Re:Oink! Oink! (Score:3, Interesting)
To date, the main use of peoples' improvisational abilities in space has been to save their own asses when they got into trouble.
(Missions like fixing the Hubble telescope don't count, either. It would have been cheaper to build several Hubbles on an assembly line and launch them as they break than to send shuttle missions to service them.)
Re:International "cooperation" (Score:2, Interesting)
By most accounts, Obama is actually a centrist. The far right has painted him as a mad spender because of the stimulus package, but that was actually a mainstream economist viewpoint also, not just left-wing economists. And the stimulus package also had tax-cuts.
Re:Oink! Oink! (Score:3, Interesting)
The language that effectively ties NASA's hands was inserted in the bill by Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from...drum roll please.... Alabama. Where NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is located.
It's also worth noting that Alabama's NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, which is the center most responsible for the Ares I and Constellation, has a strong tradition of mass incompetence for the past 30 years or so. While I'm sure the engineers there are quite good, the MSFC management is incredibly horrible and has a reputation for clamping down on any sort of dissent from their engineers. They literally haven't had a single successful launch development project during the time that many slashdotters have been alive, but quite a few failures: the X-33, X-34, National Launch System, Space Launch Initiative, Advanced Solid Rocket Motor, Orbital Space Plane, and so forth. Having MSFC in charge of a large project is pretty much a guarantee that it will suffer from feature/incompetency bloat and end up going massively overbudget, and have to be eventually canceled.
Of course, Senator Shelby is quite good at what he does, and manages to get them pork barrel funding regardless of their actual performance.