Congress, NASA

Obey no longer, and other notes

House Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. David Obey (D-WI) surprised many when he announced Wednesday that he would not run for reelection, retiring from the House after 21 terms. Obey said he was “bone tired” after a career in Congress and wanted to leave on a high note, namely, passage of health care reform earlier this year. Cynics noted that Obey was in danger of losing his chairmanship (should Republicans take control of the House in the midterm elections) or even his seat (he was facing his strongest Republican challenger in years). The relevance to NASA is that Obey has been skeptical about funding human spaceflight; in 2006 he claimed that some members of Congress suffered from a case of “Mars fever” as it debated a spending bill that included NASA.

Last week businesspeople and others from the Huntsville area came to Washington to lobby Congress about Constellation; now, it’s Colorado’s turn. A 100-person delegation from Colorado will be in Washington next week to lobby for the state’s priorities, the Denver Post reported, including preserving the Orion spacecraft.

In an editorial today, the Houston Chronicle endorses efforts by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) for “reviving NASA”. The editorial is less about the specifics of Hutchison’s plan, including study of a shuttle extension, but the low-key, bipartisan approach she’s taken. Hutchison, the editorial states, has been “working quietly and patiently with Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle, and from all parts of the country, to get things done for Texas.”

13 comments to Obey no longer, and other notes

  • amightywind

    An enemy of manned spaceflight is gone! Good luck to KBH to resurrect NASA. After 2 years of uncertainty it would be prudent to extend the shuttle program. NASA is quietly being removed from Obama’s control.

  • Andy Clark

    The Shuttle program was cancelled about 6 years ago by Bush. reviving it now is just not cost effective even if we get to the flight rate of four or five launches a year.

    Constellation was/is still a money pit into which we should throw no more treasure. Years late and grossly over budget.

    Given the money freed up by the cancellation of these programs one hopes that some new, ground breaking technologies for space exploration can be developed.

    As for Hutchison and Kosmas it is just a very cynical re-election process that says we saved – or attempted to save – lots of jobs. Jobs equals Votes. Where were these two when Bush killed the Shuttle? Kosmas was not elected then but Hutchison was and there was no concerted effort to save Shuttle then either. Constellation became the new money pit.

  • Vladislaw

    Wasn’t it KBH that proposed the bill that ended the shuttle in 2005?

  • The Shuttle program was supposed to end because it was going to be replaced by the Ares I. But since Obama wants to cancel the Ares I, now there are now calls to extend the shuttle program until private industry is ready to shuttle people safely into orbit and back. So extending the shuttle program appears to be perfectly logical.

  • The Shuttle program was supposed to end because it was going to be replaced by the Ares I.

    No, the Shuttle was supposed to end because it was viewed as unsafe and too expensive to continue. That’s why it ended in 2010, after the planned ISS completion. Ares I didn’t exist, even in the minds of the policy makers, at the time of the decision to end Shuttle, in early 2004. There was no planned replacement of the Shuttle (in terms of getting crew to orbit) for three to four years after the end of the Shuttle (2014, when the CEV was supposed to be available, and hence, the gap). The flawed decision to build an expensive and unnecessary new launch system,, Ares I, just lengthened the gap.

    But don’t let reality get in the way of your ignorance of history.

  • common sense

    @ Rand Simberg wrote @ May 6th, 2010 at 3:14 pm

    “There was no planned replacement of the Shuttle (in terms of getting crew to orbit) for three to four years after the end of the Shuttle (2014, when the CEV was supposed to be available, and hence, the gap). ”

    Well not really. There was plans for OSP first before CEV and “This early version of the plane had been expected to enter service by 2010.” AND the original O’Keefe/contractors plans were also looking at EELVs for CEV as a direct consequence of OSP.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Space_Plane

  • red

    Marcel: “The Shuttle program was supposed to end because it was going to be replaced by the Ares I. But since Obama wants to cancel the Ares I, now there are now calls to extend the shuttle program until private industry is ready to shuttle people safely into orbit and back. So extending the shuttle program appears to be perfectly logical.”

    Setting aside the historical accuracy of this, the scenario you described is not perfectly logical. Ares I is expected to be ready by about 2019, and private industry by 2016 at the latest, according to the Augustine Committee assessment. With multiple commercial competitors instead of all eggs in the Ares I basket, and with an ability to focus on the job at hand (no need for CRV requirements, no need for lunar requirements, no need to deal with civil service rules, no need for layers of oversight and undersight for tracking cost-plus spending, etc), commercial crew has lots of other advantages over the risky Ares I/Orion plan. If anything, the switch to private industry should reduce the calls to extend the shuttle according to this scenario.

  • The Aries 1 rocket WAS NEEDED. Constellation’s overall flight plan called for an earth-orbit rendezvous scheme, that was developed as a major safety measure. It separates the launch of the crew from that of the massive-weight cargo. If a giant rocket explosion occurs, then NASA will have only lost the trans-lunar/ trans-planetary cargo, and not the astronauts. Plus, the Aries 1/ Orion crew excursion vehicle has a launch escape system attached to the top of the CEV. In the event of a rocket breakup at launch or during most of the ascent, the crew can be saved by this piece of infrastructure. Misguided people, like Buzz Aldrin, have been denouncing this part of the Constellation plan; and they are wrong in their conclusions! If we decided instead, to launch the astronauts on board the same exact heavy-lift rocket, we would be taking a far more higher risk of a fatal accident. (Although, the Saturn 5, it’s true, did actually take on such a chance, during the Apollo program).

  • It separates the launch of the crew from that of the massive-weight cargo. If a giant rocket explosion occurs, then NASA will have only lost the trans-lunar/ trans-planetary cargo, and not the astronauts.

    Translunar/transplanetary cargo costs a heck of a lot more than astronauts. We have lots of astronauts.

    Plus, the Aries 1/ Orion crew excursion vehicle has a launch escape system attached to the top of the CEV. In the event of a rocket breakup at launch or during most of the ascent, the crew can be saved by this piece of infrastructure. Misguided people, like Buzz Aldrin, have been denouncing this part of the Constellation plan; and they are wrong in their conclusions!

    If you’re going to pathetically attempt to defend this program, you might at least learn how to spell it. There is no proposed crew delivery system that doesn’t have a launch abort system planned for it, so this doesn’t distinguish Ares/Orion in any way, other than that theirs has to be much heavier, more complex and mores expensive, because it has to be designed to out run an out-of-control or exploding solid rocket booster that can’t be shut down.

    And can you provide a citation from Buzz in which he objected to having a crew escape system? Or are you just making that up?

  • Well not really. There was plans for OSP first before CEV and “This early version of the plane had been expected to enter service by 2010.”</em.

    OSP died when it was decided to cancel the Shuttle, so there was no plan to replace it. And even OSP wouldn't be a replacement. The Shuttle, in terms of all its functionality, will never be replaced by any single system, and never should be.

  • Chris, your problem is that you pose a false dichotomy. The choice wasn’t Ares I vs manned Ares V. The choice was between Ares I and it’s alternatives. We didn’t need Ares I, we needed a crew transport for the rendezvous phase. Ares I is an option, but not the only one, even if we stick to shuttle derived concepts.

    Aremis

  • common sense

    @ Rand Simberg wrote @ May 10th, 2010 at 5:49 pm

    OSP was a replacement in asmuch as a crew vehicle to ISS that was supposed to be separate from the cargo vehicle. The OSP did not really die it was changed into the CEV. The Phase 1 of the CEV under O’Keefe really was nothing but an improved OSP, at least initially.

  • @ Rand Simberg….. Buzz Aldrin denounced the usage of a separate crew-transport rocket, NOT the launch escape system. That’s not what I meant. Maybe he’s thinking in terms of launching the crew on board the same exact heavy-lift rocket, as was done with Apollo/ Saturn 5, decades ago. THAT was a big risk, which was deemed tolerable in the past. But this time, I believe that Constellation has a much improved scheme, with the two separate launches for the heavy-lift cargo and the main crew excursion vehicle. The lunar landing craft & the earth-escape stage get put on board an unmanned launch, to a parking orbit, and are hence rendezvoused by the astronaut crew afterwards. It’s more complicated, true, but it makes for a safer mission scheme.

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