The online publication The Washington Dispatch has an opinion piece by Mark Whittington on John Kerry’s space policy views. Regular readers of this blog will find little new here: there is discussion of Kerry’s Senate voting record on the space station project, his lukewarm endorsement of NASA (but not the Bush exploration program), and, of course, Bunnysuitgate. And that’s the problem with this commentary and (to be fair to Mr. Whittington) many other essays and editorials on space policy published in recent months: they’re fairly shallow. They mention Kerry’s anti-ISS voting record in the Senate through 1996, but ignore the votes he cast in support of it in 1997 and 1998, or why Kerry changed his opinion of the project so quickly. Essays like this one mention the “veto threat” the Bush Administration made when the House Appropriations Committee cut NASA’s budget, but fail to point out that the threat is, on the face of it, quite empty, since it is unlikely that Bush would veto a bill that funds veterans and housing programs in an election year (even less likely if the VA-HUD appropriations bill gets wrapped up into an omnibus appropriations bill.) The veto threat is not without significance as part of a bid to convince the full House to restore funding for NASA, but most analyses don’t go even that deep. Other people complain that Bush has said nothing publicly about the Vision for Space Exploration since its unveiling in January, but don’t question if a Bush statement about the plan would be actually that positive for the effort.
Here’s hoping that the professional journalists and experts with access to policymakers and other insiders will be able to flesh out some of these and other space policy details in the next two and a half months. However, as both campaigns turn their rhetoric amplifiers up to 11 and focus on the big issues, I’m not holding out that much hope.
Although the supporting votes on ISS of 97/98 are not specifically mentioned the article does state, “Kerry now supports the space station”.
It then goes with “his opposition to human exploration beyond Low Earth orbit is just as intense as his opposition to the space station had been in the 1990s.” which, judging from Senator Kerry’s own statements, I would say is a fair assessment.
Unfortunately, there are much larger issues in this election than civil space policy. Don’t expect anyone to pay much attention to it, one way or the other.
Mark Whittington is a friend, a good writer but he is blinded by GOP politics. I oppossed the space station in the 90’s (so did Mark I cowrote several Space News and other op eds along those line).
As Rand points out there are so many other issues on the top burner that civil space isnt even going to blip except in certian areas.
Robert G. Oler
Mark Whittington and I must be equally blind, or at least presbyopic, because we bote are (or in my case were) GOP supporters of the first rank, who in my case have had to reconsider my allegiance to a political party that disdains and devalues what I consider to be of supreme importance. Sounds like what happened to Jack Schmitt when the GOP gave him little or no support for his reelection bid to the US Senate in 1982 in New Mexico.
I’ve carried on ideological battles over space policy and goals with the Republicans for years. Then I suddenly realized they were about the past, geocentrism, stasis, and technocracy/reactonary, and I was about the future, space settlement, space utilization, dynamism, Karl Popper, Manuel Castells and Network organizaton, pragmatic libertarianism, practical anarchism,and individual activism for space. And theyb were not.
Unfortunately Dynamists do not correspond well to conventional left-right political paradigms, nor do they play well with others in the conventional authoritarian-bureaucratic-hierarchical sense of conventional orgainzations. Thus Dynamists and conventional Republicans are not only not on the same page, they are not even reading from the same book.
They also do not agree on conventional views of what space is for, who should go there, who and how it should be paid for, and how it should be sold to an atomized culture successfully, if at all.So there is a gap as wide as space itself regarding space for the common man and woman the conventional space community has yet to recognize, let alone bridge. But I keep trying, one person, one editorial, one posting, one conversation, one speech at a time. Ad Aster per Aspera I guess.