Rep. Giffords is not dumb, and actually shows evidence of technical and scientific sensibility as befits a chair of the Space and Aeronautics subcommittee. But I too feel uneasy about her very close personal connections to the human space flight program (her husband and brother in-law being shuttle astronauts) such that her opinions on the matter are not clearly unbiased. ..

Doug and Loki (I hope Loki you found the thread)…

Giffords is not dumb, but your criticism is valid, she is literally married to the program…but the same can be said for almost every congressional representative in every district that has something significant to do with spaceflight…

Loki in another thread mentioned that a lot of the problem of projects was the “committee” which is Congress…and I agree as well that has merit…but that “committee” is nothing new it has existed since the dawn of The Republic.

What is new and somewhat frightening is with deficit spending being the norm the requirement for “hard choices” (as Morning Joe calls it “the sharp stick of failure”) has simply ceased. And now there is no such thing has failure. Programs which do not succeed can merely have success redefined in a manner to have failure eliminated.

Because we are more then willing to deficit spend…there never is a finite amount of money (ie the money brought in by taxes) so there never is a cut. There never are hard choices (“would you like Program A which is actually fighting the war or would you like B which is still planning”).

This situation has never really existed in The Federal government. Even in WW2 when spending on the war was going at full tilt…programs had to succeed, meet their goals both by the sharp stick of combat AND of natural resources. The US Navy institutionally wanted the Montana Class of battleships (which would have been useless) spent a lot of time trying to get them…and finally had them killed by the simple reason that the “steel” that they took was needed to build X number of other ships that were badly needed.

Even the “Midway class” carriers in a war where carriers were doing all the heavy lifting were subject to steel priorities (there were suppose to be six, FDR really did not want them, cut it to 2 and a third was only built on his death…to name one after him).

Today it does not matter. Ares can take 9 billion and use half a billion for a bottle rocket flight…and there is nothing in the Congress which says “spend it on this or that” it is “spend it on both of them”.

Gifford, Olsen, whats his name in Alabama…Nelson, they are all married to some extent to the program.

Failure is not an option, we just redefine success.

Robert G. Oler

It would seem that from the perspective of the rest of Congress, her judgments on space matters are going to be colored by her personal background. So, she’s complementing NASA? Well, hey …

Personally speaking, I find that almost ludicrous: it is Giffords, with her (almost blind, unwavering) support of the current, unaffordable (per Augustine) NASA program, who ‘isn’t necessarily getting the best advice’. And her own ‘inner circle of space people’ includes only Constellation-as-it-currently-is people, as can be seen from her speeches (and occasional rants).

Kinda like Fox calling itself Fair and Balanced, y’know?

Duh. It was Neil Armstrong. He was a man. Not really that complicated. As to who or what nationality will be the thirteenth, I’m not sure I really care.

“So if we have a US astronaut going back to the Moon in a chinese vehicle will we be able to say that the US just returned to the Moon?”

I’m guessing that if you looked carefully at the parts list for any major piece of the Constellation hardware, you’d find a respectably international vehicle.

That’s a good point. It may be that the Chinese press is making more of the talks than what was actually discussed. But if not, that should be a primary focus of the hearing.

FWIW…

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/joint-press-statement-president-obama-and-president-hu-china

is significant, especially with a replan announcement for the U.S. human space flight effort expected in just a few weeks. The Augustine committee made a big deal about the importance of international collaborations to future human space flight endeavors, and one would think that an aggressive future posture on human space flight would be responsive to that recommendation. This statement by Obama would have been a great opportunity to signal such a posture. In this case, what he didn’t say is just as interesting as what he could have said. That could mean that we’re not going to see announcement of an aggresive posture.

On the other hand, I suppose if the replan highlights international collaboration, it’s nice to have the Chinese government at least on record (see the statement of President Hu) as being interested.