You are wrong; chemicals only produce so much energy and alloys only take so much heat. It is why steam turbines do not put out any more power than they did a century ago. The SSME’s and SRB’s are awesome machines with no competitors today or in the near future. The RS-68 is pretty awesome- cheap and expendable, but it has an inferior ISP to the SSME.

Clusters last stand? You have to be joking. It is about as real as the AresI test flight. At least they have tested the escape system for Orion. The “dragon” does not even have one yet. And you can’t pull a system like that out of your butt. Falcon will never put a human being in orbit- and it will be lucky to even put satellites up before going into chapter 11. It is a joke.

And requiring Constellation to develop a heavy lift vehicle that is capable of going beyond LEO, but constrained to using much of Shuttle existing technology, is kind of like taking a 1970s VW bus and trying to make a 2010 Escalade. NASA needs new technology, and it won’t be developed if it is stuck gluing together old Shuttle parts. Unfortunately, none of this will matter if the PMs continue to be held to a much lower set of standards than say your average NASA employee. Today’s NASA senior managers lack the essential leadership qualities that are required to successfully manage projects of this magnitude; most notable is the lack of integrity.

Let’s see…

Ares/Orion have consumed almost ten billion bucks so far, and all they have to show for it is a test flight that cost about as much as all of SpaceX’ development costs to date (about five percent of that amount), and they have a vehicle on the pad, and a prototype capsule ready to laounch in a few weeks.

So what’s that again…?

three points (and try and end on space)

First the NBC/WSJ poll is one of the best in the business. The fact of bailout money eetc doesnt have a thing to do with the validity of the poll…and what that poll is saying tracks almost all other polls.

Second. The GOP really hosed themselves in this debate…it is a product of the Fox News echo room. The folks who were already against the bill were “alarmed” at the process; they dont know history, they dont understand that this is the calling card of legislation in The Republic dating back to the 1st Congress…

Process means little once the bill passes. What the GOP should have argued (and it is a valid concern) is “how much it cost”. With this vote we will be well on the road to single payer and that is going to change the dynamics of taxation in The Republic (ie they are going up) …but the flip side is that these programs are extremely popular in all the countries that have them. The GOP used the same language against social security and medicare/caid and those are very popular programs now…the GOP would not even think of repealling them.

If they want to campaign in 10 on “repeal the bill” go ahead. They would have no chance to even if they owned the Senate/House (they wont have a override majority) AND the Dems with any smart campaigning can cruicify them (“You want to repeal the law that says ‘no preexisting conditions’?”)

The GOP has no plan for America to go into this century and reform its institutions…none all it has is a very loud (and large) minority of older white very angry voters that are turning off the “middle” of American politics and almost every minority block in site.

That includes human spaceflight. If (and I now think he will) Obama wins this, he is going to have a working majority in both houses of Congress who are attached to him at the hip…ie they need him to survive…and that will include the votes on the (nationally) trivial issues of human spaceflight.

Obama will hammer the “new economy” part of human spaceflight and the American people and the non pork space Congress will be fine with that.

Very shortly the “exploration” crowd is going to be old.

Robert G. Oler

As for the Space angle, Obama will be a deeply wounded president either way this HC works out. If it fails, he looks like a fool. If it passes he looks like the bill. Full of dirty deals, expensive beyond imagination with the entire summer for the mess to be exposed. Congress then has to deal with other Obama initiatives such as Nasa. Killing jobs is a loser in Congress. Those folks will want to distance themselves from Obama and Nasa is a cheap way to start.

Rand, do you really believe Shuttle is a dead end program? It might be the only thing keeping the ISS in stable orbit a year from now. Things break on orbit.
As for Constellation, it could be a sink hole of funds. But so could SpaceX and others. SpaceX has established a record of over promising and being late. Like most aerospace primes over the past 2 or 3 decades.

Rober G, I’m curious why you think the Dems will be fine if the HC passes given the billions in payoffs for votes. Given the phony accounting to justify it such as excluding the Doc Fix and the states higher expenses for Medicad costs the feds are pushing down to them. Isn’t under estimating the costs one of the prime failures of Nasa? Yet the HC fiasco will be 2 or 3 orders of magnitude more costly than anything Nasa has pulled.

well maybe but I doubt it

what you dont seem to grasp is that THE GOP IS STILL PRETTY MUCH DISLIKED.

MOST of the people blame the GOP and the current GOP leadership for the mess we are in. they are not clear as to where it is going right now…but there are signs that Obama and his “Plans” are gaining support…ie the break right now on the health care bill.

The GOP would, in my view be on the way to a pretty good sweep if it was not for the anchor of the far right and in particular the tea party people. The latter have started to cross the line into serious “nutty” and the far right really is percieved as having no answers.

Generic polls only are useful if there is a generic dislike of one side and a “like” of the other…and the other side has a unified message.

You are free to think what you want, but I kind of sense your bias since you lay into the NBC poll. The other half of that is THE WSJ which is owned by well go look it u p…and the poll is done for them by a group which is about the best in the business. It is the gold standard of professional polling.

I dont look at them exclusively, but to claim “its bought” as you did is pretty lame.

As for space…we will see. again I disagree. but a lot of it depends on Obama getting his health care…he does that. he is bullet proof in the Congress

he will get what he wants he will have put together a pretty solid working majority

Robert G. Oler

If so, that’s another lost year, and further billions wasted on a dead-end program.

NBC/WSJ is one poll and we all know that is never enough to understand the sense of the country. But NBC has a credibility problem. The parent of NBC is GE and they got over 100 billion in bailout monies from the USG.
Money talks.

At any rate, many polls have trended down for Dems over the last 12 months and it seems all major polls are now showing disapproval for Obama and Dems. Trends require an inflection point to change direction.
What is likely to be an inflection point between now and November?

A major improvement in the new hiring across country. Not likely at all.
Cheaper HC for all? Laughable.
Cap and Tax? Sure just what the voters are demanding.
How about laying off 10’s of thousands of Nasa employees, contractors and suppliers?

This alone could accelerate Democratic Party disapprovals in the affected states. So I’ll go way out on a limb and suggest that on this issue Congressional Democrats will believe Obama is on a suicide mission.
Congress already has two programs of record, Shuttle and Constellation. They will fund them for 2011 to keep the employment picture from getting worse and Democratic prospects for re-election worse. Just as Congress has extended other POR’s such as C-17 and JSF alternate engine they will extend the POR’s Shuttle and Constellation. I initially thought Congress would go along with Obama on cancellation, no more, for the reason above.