(No, there is no irony or sarcasm intended in this headline.) The Houston Chronicle reports that House Majority Leader Tom DeLay met with members of Citizens for Space Exploration (known until last year by the clunky moniker “National Keep It Sold”), who were in Washington for their annual lobbying trip. (DeLay also spoke to the group last year.) According to the Houston Chronicle, DeLay, a self-described “space nut”, told the attendees that the “space community still needs every bit and every dollar of help it can get” and that those lobbying Congress need to “give them all the facts, but don’t hide your passion… It’s not enough to convince us. You have to stir us, inspire us and make us see the possibilities that the future holds.”
According to the article, Citizens for Space Exploration has 130 members in Washington for the trip, with plans to meet with 230 House and Senate offices. Those visits include every office of the Texas delegation except that of Republican Congressman Kenny Marchant, of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, who declined to meet with the group for unspecified reasons.
While surfing through the website for the “Citizens for Space Exploration” I found a link for Nick Lampson that leads to a dead-end page at the House of Representatives.
Maybe they need a webmaster to clean up before Tom Delay came to visit.
Does anybody know where they came up with the awful name “National Keep It Sold”? That is just so bad that I scratch my head until my hair falls out.
Reminds me of another one I just heard about a union group called “The Change to Win Coalition.”
So many tin ears…
Dang it. Marchant is my rep and he is definetly getting a letter about this.
The National Keep it Sold group was originally created to keep the space station program sold each year in Congress.
Jim Banke
There is a lot of truth to the old name “National Keep It Sold”, crass though it is. NKIS/CSE is yet another lobby that shamelessly begs for in-district patronage. They couldn’t care less if NASA achieves anything or nothing in space as long as the money keeps flowing from Washington. On the other side any way that NASA can save money is against their interests, no matter how worthy the reform.
And that is what Tom DeLay is really about, and from the looks of it, Nick Lampson too. There is no particular reason for either a pest exterminator or a tax assessor to care about space. Their interest in space surely begins and ends at “my district”.
Unfortunately, DeLay is also a terrible interloper in many other national and even international issues. He has his fingers in many other pies that he does not really care about, except as a means to extend his influence. So it is sad that it has come down to who can best bring the bacon to Bay Area Houston, DeLay or Lampson. It is very tempting to back Lampson all the way, but I can’t honestly do it, because NASA’s human spaceflight program is a fiasco.