Still curious what you have against Glenn.

So the insular community that constitutes this blog is going to be at fault when NASA loses it’s funding? Who would have thought!

What a hilarious parsing error. Means “in denial of the probable fact that NASA…” of course.

The Federal government has 4.4 million employees, of which 1.6 million are uniformed service members and 0.6 million are civilian employees of the defense department. There are a couple of hundred thousand employees in other parts of the national security apparatus. Together, they compose more than half of all Federal employees. Do you really think that national security apparatus – Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines, CIA, NSA and the rest of the alphabet soup – is a bastion of Democratic fervor?

So the insular community that constitutes this blog is going to be at fault when NASA loses it’s funding? Who would have thought!

But the point that NASA could well suffer a lot from draconian spending cuts is quite correct. But cuts to NASA are hardly going to solve this national “crisis”. Yes, Coburn’s proposed cuts look to be far milder than what could actually come to pass. But what we’re all chuckling about is how mild they are, and how fundamentally useless most of them are. Kill off NASA education and public outreach to save money? Geez. Bill Proxmire never had much impact on federal spending with his Golden Fleece awards either, but it made for great press.

I’m splitting a gut from laughter.

It’s so entertaining to see, though, that the particular insular community that constitutes this blog and its comments section is so in denial that NASA stands a good chance of losing most of its funding in two weeks.

It’s also in denial over the various budget deals to solve this “crisis”, all of which are draconian on discretionary expending, among which NASA is obviously the most optional of all. For example the Gang of Six’s plan will likely cut far _more_from NASA than Coburn’s plan recommended. Keep on having fun daydreaming about your big big rockets and astronaut extravaganzas. I hope you get to see a lot of them in the movies.

With Gemini part of the reason ejection seats were considered good enough is that a hypergolic booster cannot easily explode; because the propellants ignite on contact they cannot mix very well. Explosive decomposition of the hydrazine (which can be used as a monopropellant after all) was apparently considered unlikely.

With shuttle and Gemini we were willing to launch people into space with only ejection seats as an escape system. If we *really* wanted to we could modify the Dragon hatches, add ejection seats and launch people in a year. Any gap in US manned launch capabilities is purely the choice of congress made to protect its parochial interests. Congress is choosing to have a gap.

“NO FURTHER AMERICAN-BUILT SPACECRAFTS WILL FLY FOR THE REST OF THE DECADE.”

What an ignorant statement.

At the very least, the MPCV, which is the Cadillac Escalade of the capsule world, will be ready for testing in just a few years, and the main thing holding it up from manned testing is Congress, since they want the SLS to be the only crew carrier for it. Go lobby Congress to free up funds to certify Delta IV Heavy as an alternate launch vehicle, which would also keep us from being grounded when/if the SLS becomes grounded.

Secondly, though Congress is not fully in love with the CCDev program, they have been funding it. And in fact Commercial Crew is the primary designated method for supporting the ISS, and it has been since the Bush/Griffin FY2006 budet. The CCDev program doesn’t need as much as the MPCV program, and they can get two or more American crew systems going by 2016. The SpaceX Dragon capsule is already flying, so outfitting it for crew won’t take the rest of the decade.

It surprises me why someone who purports to be such an American space supporter would totally ignore and not support the efforts of the American aerospace industry to provide multiple ways to space. And they are not taking 100% of their money from NASA like Lockheed Martin is for the MPCV, these companies are investing their own money, multiplying the investment from the American Taxpayer. What’s wrong with that?