On Saturday American Solutions for Winning the Future, the organization created by Newt Gingrich to, in its words, “provide real, significant solutions to the most important issues facing our country”, will be hosting a Solutions Day featuring a number of workshops on various policy topics. (The event actually kicks off tonight with a speech by Gingrich in Atlanta.) Among the workshop sessions will be one titled “Space – The Race to the Endless Frontier”, hosted by former Congressman Bob Walker:
Future national greatness depends on leading the world in the creation of new knowledge and nowhere is the potential for new knowledge development more evident than on the endless frontier of outer space. Yet, our national space efforts and programs have become politicized and bureaucratized in ways that retard rather than enhance our access to that endless frontier. Sparking entrepreneurial, scientific and exploratory interest in space demands an agenda that recognizes the need for significant private sector involvement and investment, and further recognizes the national security imperative of space leadership. Former Congressman Robert Walker will discuss ideas for fundamentally changing our space policy.
The workshop, from 4-5 pm Saturday, will take place at the University of West Georgia, but will be streamed on the Internet. There will apparently be an option for interaction with the audience; perhaps someone can ask Walker what he thinks of NASA administrator Mike Griffin’s thoughts about prizes.
Actually, since Bob Walker, former Chairman of the House Science Committee, is heading up the Space portion of Solutions Day, it might be more interesting to find out his views on prizes and whether he thinks a big, all encompassing Mars Prize is doable. It’ll be interesting to see what sort of agenda is arrived at.
Since Mr. Walker was Chairman of the House Science Committee, and since his former Staff Director of the Space Subcommittee is now the Deputy Administrator of NASA , I personally will be quite interested in finding out what he is willing to say about how NASA is falling short, and what they should do different.
I am guessing he will speak in generalities, and the end result will not be that interesting to serious policy analysts or advocates.
– Al
Aren’t we still confusing space research and NASA? Space research is paid for much more by the military than any other agency. They do mention the national security motivation for space so they do recognize that space is still a big priority for the military.
Certainly the military sends few missions to the Moon, but they have done that as well.
But if we want to focus on the technology developed for space, the research paid for that is done with satellites, etc – we should be looking at the military budget. NASA is a relatively small part of that and will be for the foreseeable future. The military is still using the same (reliable) launch vehicles (Delta, Atlas) and they are using newer vehicles as well.
The military seems to have avoided much of the political interference that other agencies have seen.
Charles
Off-topic but there’s some (very) brief and paraphrased commentary on civil space exploration programs from four Democratic Presidential candidates here:
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php
FWIW…
Bob Walker appears to be giving TWO talks as far I can tell from Newt’s schedule of speakers.
One on space and the other on the hydrogen economy.
To a large extent, a genuine hydrogen economy would benefit from a more abundant deployment of fuel cells and more abundant platinum group metals would help that process.
If Dennis Wingo is correct about recovering PGM from asteroid fragments on the lunar surface, then a nice connection could be made between the two talks being given by Bob Walker.
From the website:
Back when Gingrich was Speaker, I didn’t really like him – the captured cell phone conversation didn’t help him either. But now, years later, I look back, and seems a lot Gingrich said makes common sense.
I say give Newt’s solutions day a chance. National Newt solutions day.
National “Newtlution day”. OK just having some fun but 9/11 and the Columbia loss revealed the NSA, CIA, FBI, NASA and it appears by sampling many of our Bureaucracies are not planning ahead.
One problem with a solution day is not knowing what the problem is to begin with. I have thought about doing a diagnosis of one Bureaucratic patient, just for fun, to show some of the ailments and infections our Bureaucracies suffer from.
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