Yesterday President Bush paid a visit to the Parkland Magnet Middle School for Aerospace Technology in Rockville, Maryland (just a few miles from where I live, as it turns out). While at the school, he gave a speech on the American Competitiveness Initiative. He even mentioned to drop NASA’s name twice, although not in any meaningful way:
We saw two scientists who are here from NASA. These are good, hard-working folks who said, I kind of want to lend my expertise to try to convince a child that science is cool.
Later:
As I told you earlier, it’s really important for students to see firsthand what it’s like to be a scientist. [Secretary of Education] Margaret [Spellings] and I didn’t do a very good job of teaching what it’s like to be a scientist. The two guys from NASA did an excellent job of teaching them what it is like to be a scientist.
It’s doubtful this will placate those critics who believe that the President hasn’t paid NASA enough public attention in the two-plus years since the unveiling of the Vision for Space Exploration.
I hope Mr. Griffin has pencilled in lunch with Nick Lampson.
I hope Mr. Griffin has pencilled in lunch with Nick Lampson.
To heckle him, presumably. If Robert Eckels enters the race, he will wipe the floor with Lampson.
“If” is the operative word, of course.
A contested Republican field among a group of current or former state, city, and county officials vs a Democratic Congressional veteran with $1.5 million or more in the bank makes for intersting times, even in Harris County.
The overall trends would suggest Dr. Griffin and the senior Constellation Program managers should be looking very closely at where the majority of the production-related jobs are going to be in the period 2009-2012.
“If” is the operative word, of course.
Prophetic words, those.
Eckels decided not to run.
A contested Republican field among a group of current or former state, city, and county officials vs a Democratic Congressional veteran with $1.5 million or more in the bank makes for intersting times, even in Harris County.
Not so prophetic words.
The same article notes that:
“Because DeLay, R-Sugar Land, won the GOP nomination for a 12th term in the March primary and then announced he would step down, the nominee on the November general election ballot will be selected by party leaders in the four counties that are part of the 22nd Congressional District.”
So the Republican field will not be contested, at least not publicly.
” The overall trends would suggest Dr. Griffin and the senior Constellation Program managers should be looking very closely at where the majority of the production-related jobs are going to be in the period 2009-2012.”
I hear future President McCain is a VSE supporter. Griffin might just keep his job.
One score and five years ago, our bureaucrats brought forth on this continent a new jalopy, conceived without vision, in right stuff irrational exuberance, and dedicated to the proposition that all Astronauts are created unequal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, between Sunni and Shiite, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. The House has resolved to dedicate the remaining portion of those jalopies that we should get rid of as soon as possible. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a large sense, we cannot dedicate – we cannot consecrate – we cannot hollow – this jalopy. The brave men and women and schoolteacher, dead, who could not escape, unlike their predecessors, have consecrated it, far above our poor, deficit ridden power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember the space shuttle program, and it will soon forget what little they did, just as the infant bureaubaby was too young to learn the independent redundancy Apollo 13 success lesson and apply it to the shuttle design.
It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who have fought here to “scuttle the shuttle” have thus far so nobly advanced.
It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that visionless, lost cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead who died in vanity – that this nation, under God until the Supreme Court rules otherwise, shall have a new deal birth of freedom of speech within bureaucracy – and that reformed government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not default in bankruptcy from the earth.
– Abe