The full Senate Commerce committee is scheduled to meet Thursday morning to handle a number of bills and nominations. Included in the list is S.2541, the NASA authorization bill introduced last month. Not listed is HR 3752, so I assume that bill is still tied up in a debate over definitions.
Thursday afternoon the space subcommittee of the Commerce Committee is scheduled to hold a hearing about Saturn. No witnesses have been listed yet, but NASA’s legislative affairs web site lists Orlando Figueroa as one of the witnesses. It’s a curious topic for a hearing, since there’s no legislative issues or controversy surrounding exploration of the planet. Perhaps Sen. Brownback just wants to hear some of the early results of the Cassini mission…
Senator Brownback has held a number of these “informational” hearings over the past six months or so. Usually he and Senator Nelson are the only ones to show up.
Sometimes there is no more information at these hearings than you can get from searching the web, and one could argue that they are wasting NASA peoples’ time (I am sure that some of the people prepping for these hearings don’t like taking that time). However, it’s probably true that these kinds of things take place in private anyway–agency reps briefing senators–and there’s no reason that they should not be public. And they also give the agency another forum to show off their achievements.
Keep in mind that hearings serve many purposes, and gathering information is only one of them (and not really the most important one). A major role of hearings is theater.
I should also add that we should not be surprised if someone asks a question about JIMO and what Cassini can teach us about it.
Did anyone see the hearing on Cassini? I missed it. Anything of interest?
It is my understanding that Senator Brownback might have taken the opportunity to leaven the positive discussion of Cassini accomplishments with some discussion of NASA’s solesource award of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter to Goddard.
As Dwayne suggests, sometimes hearings serve multiple purposes, and as all managers know, it’s sometimes useful to sandwich a reprimand between acknowledgements.