As noted here last week, the Senate Commerce Committee’s space subcommittee has scheduled a hearing for this Wednesday on Human Spaceflight: The Space Shuttle and Beyond. This is the counterpart to the subcommittee’s hearing last month on ISS. NASA administrator Michael Griffin will testify on the first panel, while a second panel will feature speakers from industry, academia, and government. The hearing will take place at 10:30 am Wednesday in Russell 253 and will be webcast. Interestingly, the hearing will take place the same day as the Space Foundation’s Space at the Crossroads conference in DC. Griffin is scheduled to speak at that conference as well in the late afternoon.
Griffin had to adapt fast to the short time available, cutting nearly all of his statement about the organizational transition from Shuttle to CEV. With his engineer’s hat firmly on his head he began to pull the plug on ISS research; the response was encouraging “How much more money do want Mike?”