NASA’s Manned Space Flight: The Cheese Gets More Binding

The NASA meatball is turning into a punching bag. 

Key members of the U.S. Senate have given NASA until June 3 to produce a plethora of documents and other data detailing the agency’s efforts to comply with a 2010 law that requires it to begin work on a heavy-lift launch vehicle and crew capsule capable of manned missions beyond low Earth orbit.

Yeah, they’re only authorizers, but it’s still going to leave a mark.

This is the predictable consequence of what happens when manned space flight lacks an understandable, publically supported, and executable vision.  And when any of those three characteristics are missing, the program just doesn’t work (metaphorically, not technically).

Is the angst and gnashing of teeth regarding this (new space versus old space and all that) really about power, money, and control?  It is?!  I’m shocked, shocked!

Thompson: big administration defense industrial base blunders

Loren Thompson, who voted for candidate Obama in 2008 and expects to vote for President Obama in 2012, excoriates the administration on its handling of the “looney” NLRB/Boeing situation as well as the “inept handling of NASA’s human spaceflight program.”

Except Thompson doesn’t seem to excoriate the administration for these pratfalls based on purely on the goodness of proper industrial base issues and policy, but in also on politics and voting patterns:

…thousands of people in South Carolina who might have secured good-paying jobs at the new Boeing plant will have to keep searching just because they live in a right-to-work state. Obama wasn’t going to win South Carolina anyway, but how are people going to react to this crazy case in other right-to-work states like Arizona, Iowa and Virginia? Not by voting for the president. Why doesn’t the White House just admit the NLRB made a mistake and drop the case?

And

…Voters in Florida’s central region around Cape Kennedy hold the electoral balance of power between the state’s conservative north and more progressive south, so wiping out thousands of jobs there with a poorly conceived plan to restructure the manned spaceflight program could kill Obama’s prospects in the Sunshine State. Is it possible that White House political operatives don’t recall how a few thousand votes in Florida delivered the White House to Bush in 2000?

 After making his points, Thompson closes with this:

I’m not saying the administration should be backing bad ideas just to win votes, but on NLRB [and] NASA… it is doing foolish things that alienate millions of voters.

So to summarize: inept and looney things that are bad ideas and alienate voters should not be pursued.