The rest of the Florida delegation are suspiciously absent from the proceedings.

Some (cough*Nelson*cough) are completely selling his own electorate down the river to get his golf-buddy Mike (or a simulacrum) back. Way to go; backing the lame horse that can’t successfully get out of the gate! Not to mention also getting in the face of, and annoying the new President, even before he takes office. Brilliant. That’s really going to help Florida! Thanks bub!

Of course, if you sell your own electorate down the river like this, they get a chance to get their own revenge on you a few years later. I will certainly be campaigning for the other guy because of this, and many of my colleagues here agree. Nelson’s next election campaign will come up in 2012, right in the middle of the ‘gap’ when times are worst for this area and everybody will know what he did. He hasn’t got a chance.

I wonder if any of the other delegates will figure out that 6,000 jobs lost around KSC results in 18,000 other related jobs also being lost? It will mean thousands more houses going into foreclosure, so house prices will get slashed yet again on top of the already bad economy. Way to go; the Flori-duh delegation!

I hope they all realize that not one of them won their seats by these sorts of numbers.

Very true. Even Griffin now admits that it would take an additional $4 billion to have a hope of accelerating Ares I/Orion operations by one year, from 2016 to 2015. See (add http://www):

.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6208583.html

Of course, that assumes that GAO’s 2017 projection for J-2X engine availability doesn’t push the whole schedule yet another year to the right.

FWIW…

$2B would be much better spent on something like COTS-D to encourage U.S. commercial transportation to and from the Space Station. That might be enough to get 2 or 3 companies to develop such services, compared to possibly completing Constellation a few months earlier (or reducing its delays by that amount, if more delays occur). This type of commercial transportation is important for long-term economic reasons, as it not only solves NASA’s ISS crew transport problem and generates economic activity while doing so, but it also enables new economic activity like space tourism and Bigelow-style space station development. Seeing his transportation problem being addressed might also encourage Bigelow to stay on track, helping keep a current business humming along.