Local space politics, Maryland style

As I noted in previous post, it can be difficult to find information on what positions (if any) Congressional candidates hold on space. I discovered this first-hand when I tried to learn what the candidates for the open US Senate seat here in Maryland thought about space policy in general, and NASA in particular. Maryland isn’t considered a “space state” in the same group as Texas and Florida, but the state is home to NASA Goddard, the Applied Physics Lab, the Space Telescope Science Institute, and a number of aerospace companies, including the corporate headquarters of Lockheed Martin. Maryland is also a partner in the Mid-Atlantic Regional Spaceport at Wallops Island, Virginia, just south of the Maryland border. So space should have a somewhat higher profile here than, say, Nebraska.

So, back in September, I sent queries to the campaign offices of Ben Cardin, a congressman who won the Democratic nomination, and lieutenant governor Michael Steele, the Republican nominee. (I also contacted the main Democratic challenger to Cardin, Kweisi Mfume, but I never heard back from him before he lost the primary to Cardin.) I was pleasantly surprised, less than two weeks later, to come home to find a phone message from a Cardin staffer. He said that Cardin agreed with Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski that NASA needs additional funding (Mikulski has been backing an effort to get an additional $1 billion for NASA in FY07), expressing concern that funding for other NASA programs could be threatened by the exploration program. Not too many details, but then there’s only so much you can squeeze into a 30-second voice mail message.

As for Steele, I never heard back from his campaign. I sent off a second, identical query through his campaign web site last week; as of this morning, still no response.