Only a handful of members of Congress made it down to Florida for Monday’s launch of the shuttle Endeavour: five members, including local congresswoman Rep. Sandy Adams (R-FL) and Rep. Pete Olson (R-TX), were included on lists of VIPs attending the launch provided by NASA (a sixth, of course, was Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ), the wife of STS-134 commander Mark Kelly.) By comparison, nearly 50 members of Congress made it down to Florida for the April 29th attempt that also lured President Obama to the space center.
A couple of members not in attendance did make statements about the launch on Monday, though. Sen. Key Bailey Hutchison (R-TX), the ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, wished the shuttle crew and other involved with the mission well. (The release, curiously, repeatedly misspells the shuttle’s name as “Endeavor”.) Hutchison also congratulates the team involved with the shuttle’s major payload, the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. The senator was a major advocate for flying the billion-dollar multinational experiment when it was dropped from the shuttle manifest as the agency worked towards retiring the shuttle in 2010. A provision of the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 called on NASA to add an additional shuttle mission primarily for flying the AMS, and the agency did so formally in 2009.
Rep. Ralph Hall (R-TX), chairman of the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee, also issued a statement about the launch, providing generic thanks to the mission and acknowledging the shuttle program’s thirty years of operations. Hall added he was “very thankful” that Rep. Giffords could attend the launch as she recovers from the Tucson shooting in January. Giffords is the ranking member of the committee’s space and aeronautics subcommittee.
Then there is Rep. Tom Reed (R-NY), a member not normally known for speaking out on space issues. Speaking with local TV station WETM, Reed makes it clear he’s not a fan of increasing NASA’s budget, at least with federal dollars. “There’s limited dollars to go around so hopefully this can be expanded to a program that is going to find alternative revenue sources,” he told WETM. The reported added that Reed suggested NASA find “private and state resources to help solve the revenue problem.” Because, you know, states are just flush with cash to spend on NASA…
The AMS is certainly one of the more exciting pieces of station hardware, it nicely illustrates the versatility and unique capabilities of ISS as a research platform.
The launch was going to take place during space propulsion class, but the lecturer was nice and gave us a break, so we watched the live stream right there in the auditorium on the big screen.
:”Jeff” aka 51D over at NASAspaceflight needs to babble on policy less and make sure the orbiters names are spelled correctly in the press releases…
doesnt he work for Kay?
RGO
AMS is certainly going to be one of the most scientifically interesting pieces of ISS. But while it may nicely illustrate the versatility of ISS, there are no capabilities that could not have been engineered into AMS as a free-flyer. That was an option, when ISS was going to be taken off line, that would have cost about $400M. What Sam Ting got out of the deal, putting it on ISS with Shuttle, was a free ride from SOMD Launch Services Program, much as HST did. SOMD also funded the integration for AMS, essentially providing it with a free spacecraft. Given that ISS managers were desperate to associate ISS with high priority science, that was a politically astute move on Ting’s part.
Lol. If the space states want to keep their jobs they SHOULD front the money for them. But of course that would never happen. And with commercial space companies on the rise and proving they can do things cheaper than NASA why would any investor give money to NASA?
NASA really blew it when their incompetence was displayed to the world- and the President of the United States– when they failed to launch STS-134 on time two weeks ago after thirty years of shuttle flight experience and literally months to prepare ot get STS-134 off on time.
The only real interest the media has in this mission is the human interest angle about Giffords. The President…. and the country… have moved on from the space shuttle program. The press will wax emotionally over the ending of this program, do some TV specials and roll out footage from the vaults to mark the passage of three decades yet few of them have ever really asked the hard questions regarding the failure to reduce operational costs and the glaringly poor management decisions made as layed bare in two separate accident reports.
Doug Lassiter wrote @ May 17th, 2011 at 3:02 pm
Ah, thanks for the insight.
All I’ve heard so far was that making it a free-flyer would have been vastly more expensive due to the power requirements, but $400m doesn’t sound that extreme. It’s not pocket change either however, and as we’re seeing with JWST and MSL, the possibility of delays and cost overruns is an ever present threat.
Anyway what I meant about versatility was that the station allows for this sort of thing to be integrated with relative ease. Another example would be VASIMR, if they ever get around to it.
Noted that quite a chunk of the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer was researched and built by the Chinese. Pity they were excluded from the launch. Makes the U.S. look like a bit of a spoiled child, pinching another’s candy and then refusing to share. Mud on yer face Wolf.