Re: congressional hearings, I wonder if they’ll summon Garver instead? I get the impression that there’s a lot more dislike for her than for Bolden. Plus, I guess, some of the representatives more overtly hostile to Obama’s administration may be more at ease to engage a woman bureaucrat than a retired general and former astronaut.
(Forgive the long-winded phrasing, I tried hard to avoid using the word “target” which I feel is probably a tad inappropriate at the current time)

I look forward to the Congressional hearings on this, since Bolden doesn’t have to do much in defense of the SLS because it’s a re-hash of the Ares V. All he has to do is explain why the approach Congress wants is going to be larger/longer than they want, and let the economic forces (budget cuts & industry competition) slowly crush the HLV pork hopes of Nelson, Vitter, Hutchison, Shelby, et al.

To be fair to Shelby, he put that restriction in place at a time when no alternatives had yet been proposed and the extent to which Obama was to retool NASA’s direction was rumored, but unknown. But aside from some very brief hollering immediately after the CR was passed, little has been said about this provision outside of interested circles, ie us. That’s the real crime. This went from minor legislative gaffe to wasteful blunder on October 1st of 2010.

What I don’t understand is why we don’t hear anything about it. This is about the lowest-hanging fruit out there and just ripe for scoring a few fiscal conservative gold stars for any member of congress ready to take it. Perhaps once the Giffords freeze is off of congress and Health Care Bill grandstanding is over we’ll see some action on this.

No excuses, I’m afraid. This is what you get when you attempt to post and eat breakfast at the same time.

Apparently, there is a lot of paper shuffling and time-wasting going on to spend the budget as they aren’t allowed to do anything else. Millions, weekly, are simply being frittered away by project teams sitting on their @$$es, waiting for headquarters to be allowed to let them work without being subject to federal prosecution.

FWIW, I think that this is actually a more important issue than the HLV report pass-back. NASA is essentially leaking cash everywhere due to this ill-conceived attempt on Shelby’s part to protect Ares-I when it became clear it was executable. The sooner that it is repealed, the sooner that this money can be spent on something that can fly with a modicum of safety.