I think it has always been true, but often not realized, that people don’t really believe that we can spend our way out of the mess we are in. The actions of the administration and Congress up to this point have been seriously at odds with this view and the results in Massachusetts confirm this. If the administration and the Dems in Congress are smart, they will embrace this view and claim it as their own. They will say they were always about sensible spending and reasonable governance. They will cut their losses and give up the current anemic (yet expensive) health care bill with the long view (next November) in mind. If they are clever enough, they may even be able to keep a slim majority in the fall. However, if instead, they stick in their heels, they will lose everything, now and in the fall. I don’t expect the latter, but who knows – this is politics after all.

What I do expect is a worried Congress that goes on a witch hunt to find and cut any and all wasteful or questionable spending it can. Ironically, this will be one of those rare instances in politics when the good of the one (the legislator) is also the good of the many. For, by eagerly being seen to cut spending, congressmen and senators will not only save their own necks, but they will actually be helping government to reduce in size and expense. We may even hear from some who are brave enough to tell us the truth and declare that we have become a nation of people who wish to be served rather than to serve, a nation living on entitlements instead of hard work, a nation that looks back to glory days instead of forward to unmet and daunting challenges worth working hard to achieve.

NASA is going to get slashed, no question about it. But they have a choice here. They can go on a voluntary weight reduction program, keeping only what they need for the future, or they can get multiple and drastic amputations leading to an eventual demise. NASA would be wise to offer up the Ares program for cancellation if it means staying in the game later on. They would be wise to partner up with commercial space and make their many excellent facilities available to help support the new space market. This would not only help new space, but keep NASA in the game. NASA would be wise to ask congress to divert some of the Ares funds to help support commercial space. This plays well if they remind Congress that the ISS is in danger of not being utilized as the beloved national laboratory that is before it is mothballed because we lack the capacity to ferry astronauts there and back. In fact, if they play their cards right, NASA could even end up remaining in the driver’s seat by getting sign-off rights on Dragon. The point here for NASA is, what good is keeping your queen if you only get checkmated in the process!

who wants to bet that this is the start of the end of the kind of human exploration of space that the far right folks seem to think is necessary…yes.

Robert G. Oler

The first lesson I hope NASA learns from this (and other budget-cutting proposals, poll results, etc) is that the new HSF program should not be designed to collapse in the face of inevitable budget swings or downward trends…

what I hope is that in the coming years a space policy (and indeed most federal policies) on human spaceflight rethink themselves and are indeed directly connected with the people who pay the bills.

I dont care how much the folks who are “go to the Moon” or “go to Mars” drum beaters come up with reasons to go…all the reasons so far are 1) paper mache and 2) have no real intention of changing the lives of the folks who are “not going”.

Federal Spending should pass a “we the people” test. What does the spending do to make the “People” have a better life, have a better business, have a better future. If those three questions cannot be answered in a manner which is so obvious as to be clear in the first minute or two of the answer…then we should simply pause and question why we are doing the spending.

Look at all the reasons given out for Ares and Constellation. None of them are worth a bucket of warm spit. They are all so amorphous as to be undefinable. Particularly in the face of Delta and Atlas…but even more so in the face of someone “Musk” who in a country that values free enterprise is the model of how that enterprise should work.

I’ve never gotten an answer from one single Ares hugger…why? Why should that rocket, particularly Ares 1 be pursued in the face of Atlas and Delta…much less in the face of Musk.

Whittington talks about “some other things not beloved of uber libs like Feingold, ” (this thread)

Yet he can never explain doesnt even try…how he supports a federal effort to create a rocket that competes with someone who is spending their own money to develop a free enterprise system.

I dont get it

Robert G. Oler

@ Donald F. Robertson

This is why I believe that we need three legitimate parties in this country: one liberal, one conservative, and one moderate party that would probably be composed of former middle of the road Democrats and Republicans..

this is like Joe Biden’s solution in Iraq (when he was a Senator)…it assumes divisions are solid which are not and indeed are arbitrary.

Robert G. Oler

This is why I believe that we need three legitimate parties in this country: one liberal, one conservative, and one moderate party that would probably be composed of former middle of the road Democrats and Republicans. We need a true liberal party in this country. And we need a true conservative party in this country. But we also need a real moderate alternative to the two extremes!

The second lesson I hope NASA learns from this is that NASA HSF should be more than just a jobs program and an Apollo reenactment, which is essentially what NASA’s current POR HSF exploration program is. The original Vision for Space Exploration and the Aldridge Commission (now backed up by the Augustine Committee) included a strong technology development effort in areas like ISRU and many others that could improve our long-term space development prospects and deliver technology benefits at home. ESAS scrapped this and existing NASA technology efforts. The original VSE (etc) also included a strong robotic exploration and astronaut precursor/helper program that would bring more technology improvements and show us what we can usefully do in HSF exploration. ESAS trimmed this way back. The original VSE included strong international and commercial participation, both of which, if designed correctly, should help ease budget problems, improve political support, and provide many “side” benefits (some of which may be more important than NASA exploration itself). ESAS scrapped this, too. The original VSE goals were to deliver science, economic, and security benefits, and it had viable ways to achieve all of these goals. ESAS scrapped this, making NASA Exploration an obvious target for those wanting to trim budgets from areas that don’t deliver benefits to the taxpayer.

Let’s hope we get a new NASA HSF plan, regardless of whether it’s “Moon First”, “Flexible Path”, or some other variation or mixture, let’s that includes a strong technology program, more synergy between robotic exploration and HSF, practical national benefits that are obvious to the taxpayer, strong and well-designed commercial and international participation, and a plan that is not “budget-brittle”.

Well, Robert, I see a Brown victory as another big step into national paralysis and eventual chaos,..

I dont. The Republic is ungovernable from the extremes. The Founders set it up to be that way. They also set it up so that eventually the people could take control of it back.

We are seeing that.

Robert G. Oler

— Donald