The space community can thank President Bush for articulating a vision for space that is inclusive, converged, and outward bound, and anyone who thinks they could have done better haven’t proven it. This does not mean Republicans care about space either, because they largely don’t. If you don’t believe it, ask former astronaut, moonwalker, and US Senator Harrison H. Schmitt if the Republicans cared enough about space to back him up and insure his reelection to be a spokesman for issues of the future, of space, of technology. According to him, nobody else in the US Senate cared about it, and labeled Dr. Schmitt “Senator Moonbeam”, for being interested in such issues as space, technology, and the future. And until Republican space supporters care enough about space to find ways to get mainstream Republicans to back the President’s space plan up and defend it to people like conservative radio talk show host Laura Ingraham, who ridiculed the Vision for Space as not a really “Conservative” issue, unworthy of being born or supported, and unnecessary for Republicans to support in large numbers.

Obviously space development and settlement is an issue that is ignored by mainstream political parties, the entertainment, news, and mainstream media, and society as a whole. Obviously space must be supported, promoted, financed, and furthered by different means, and in different ways, than what we have done that doesn’t work, hasn’t worked, and will never work. Networked Means are the obvious answer, and projects involving universities, public relations students, faculty, engineers, mainstream Aerospace contractors and Alt.Space entrepreneurial companies, and all other organizations who don’t at present think they have anything at all to do with space, and get them involved in projects that involve them as constituents outside politics as we practice it these days. Also, we can get a network of people in a city or state who use their own unique skills and own network of friends, associates, factories, using their own time and effort on projects that can be done in a few months to a few years that make real progress in our ability to get to space, live in space, and establish a foothold in space for the common man and woman.

I do not have time in this column, or on this day to fully detail what can be done via networked means, as I am working on doing this in the Denver Colorado Metropolitan area, and anyone who wants to know how can read the editorials of John Carter McKnight, entitled the Spacefaring Web, for an introduction. Beyond that, read the same books John and I have read, like the trilogy by Manuel Castells on the Network Society, or Virginia Postrell’s work on Dynamism, entitled, The Future and it’s Enemies, for an introduction, and go from there.

straight from the Nasawatch site:

27 May 2004: Russians to submit bill for spacewalk, MSNBC

“The “acceptable” payment would be 500 hours of crew work time – that is, time during which one country’s crew member performs tasks for the other country’s programs. This would involve no cash transfer, and in fact NASA is forbidden by law to pay Russia for any space-related services. But the value of the time request could amount to as much as $10 million, by one expert’s informal measure.”

Editor’s note: Gee, the Russians sure learned all the tricks of capitalism from us really fast, didn’t they? Wait until your business partner is stuck over a barrel – in a bad way – and then stick it to him. What is really annoying about this is the fact that throughout the 90s America subsidized the Russian space program either through more than a billion dollars in cash and several billion in shuttle flights to maintain and repair Mir – and a Shuttle joy ride for Valery Ryumin as well. Given this latest stick up, one certainly has to reconsider whether it is wise to deliberately rely upon them to fly Americans on Soyuz spacecraft after 2010 while we retire the shuttle and bring the CEV online.

No; just as at JPL, the folks would all be ‘corporate’ employees (or university employees, if a university was the managing corporation).
FFRDC’s aren’t a panacea; there’s a long list of scandals from some of them as well. But there’s a lot to be said for them, particularly in both personnel management, ability to offer more competitve salaries than can be offered civil servants, etc.

Okay, so in other words, you are not favoring firing government employees based solely upon their religious views, but rather their speech. So you are not in favor of shelving the entire First Amendment, just the half of it dealing with speech?

This means extremist not normal practicing people that do not impress their religion values onto others no matter what faith or denomination.

But you think that religious people should be fired at NASA? Does this mean all religous people? Or do you favor firing Baptists and fundamentalists and Orthodox Jews, but not Unitarians or Reform Jews?