http://www.spacenews.com/civil/120629-nrc-mulls-ctr-consolidation.html

Note that this is a $1 million strategic review ordered by Congress, with Republican Rep. Frank Wolf pushing for center consolidation. I’m guessing he figures Wallops is safe as long as its launching COTS rockets and Barbara Mikulski is in the Senate to protect it. (Wallops is run by Goddard.)

This is a bigger potential threat to NASA Glenn than whatever Griffin is worried about.

1) Confuse and conflate, even purposefully, an internal, mid-level NASA budget exercise with White House-level decision documents. It’s too easy for the Obama Administration to refute.

2) Forget to check their record of workforce reductions at Glenn Research Center. The fact that the Glenn workforce shrank during Griffin’s tenure as much as Griffin claims he is worried that the Obama Administration will shrink it makes Griffin look like a grasping, desperate fool.

I mean, c’mon, we’re talking about a NASA Administrator who served four years and his AA for Program Analysis and Evaluation, who previously worked at OSTP. Of all the people in the world who should be able to differentiate between NASA and White House deliberations or think to doublecheck prior workforce figures before making a political play, it should be these two.

I guess I’ve come to expect Griffin to shame his tenure as Administrator with this kind of ham-fisted and ineffective politicking. But Pace should know better and did at one time. It’s hard to believe that the guy who was smart enough to recommend opening up our GPS signals to the rest of the world and make it the de-facto positioning standard with all the power that entails is foolish enough to play these schoolyard-level games with Griffin.

Big disappointment.

Don’t know if that would be on top of sequestration or not should that time bomb actually go off. Whatever the case, Romney has promised to cut far more out of the agency’s budget in his first months in office than this supposed reduction would save over four fiscal years. How much that would affect Glenn is TBD. But, it’s really what they should be focused on.

Griffin and Pace showing up in a key battleground state to pronounce their “personal concerns” about this supposed plan with no connection to the Romney campaign is BS. They’re acting like these supposedly independent Super PACs whose attacks are none-the-less perfectly aligned with the candidates’ campaigns. Griffin and Pace’s supposed independence shields them from the obvious questions about Romney lack of a space vision (which these guys are supposed to be developing, right?) and the overall cuts he wants to make in government.

Is this going to be a pattern? Are Laurel and Hardy here going to show up in other battleground states like Florida and Virginia to try to scare people? Does Romney just want to use members of this advisory board as attack surrogates? Will the candidate ever explain what he wants to do with the space program?

The Supreme Court’s ruling does not change the fact that the health care law has been a tremendous burden to our nation’s economy, job creators and the seniors whose care is at risk.

So a bill that doesn’t take effect until 2014 caused the recession.

This is the same nut job who, when she took office, claimed that U.S. astronauts were being forced to fly on Chinese rockets.

I’ve sent letter after letter to Adams calling her on her lies, but she never responds of course.

Thanks to redistricting, Adams won’t represent KSC and north Merritt Island any more after this year. Unfortunately, now I get Bill Posey, who’s almost as bad.

I would make three points to your repetition of right wing flackery.

The first is that Obama or at least the folks he has running NASA recognize a common reality that seems to escape you. The current NASA is not capable of doing any of the missions a lot of people would like to do….at almost any price.

Maybe Obama should have known that as a candidate but the view is different on the campaign trail…and the notion that an Apollo style program has any political support (not to mention the dollar signs) should have vanished for even the most nutty GOP right winger here…after the Florida GOP primary. That is the reality.

Second a very aggressive human spaceflight program in any nation begins and thrives with a functional commercial space industry. UNless one is trying to do every single human spaceflight effort as an Apollo one (something you seem to embrace) with nothing but national pride as the selling point…you have to have a thriving commercial human spaceflight industry to do it. That there is a thriving commercial aviation market is one reason all that wants to be done at the South Pole, can be done.

Finally as to the ACA. YOu are simply repeating GOP lies. One just one of the Justices (the Chief) who affirmed the bill and the penalties in it did so under the taxing provision of The Constitution. The other four justices did it under the commerce clause. That no more makes it a tax then SLS is a space program. AT BEST what it is is a tax penalty, a fairly limited one that will if people decide to not get health insurance (a failure of personal responsibility) most likely simply lower their deduction. there are no criminal penalties despite all the GOP handwrining nor is it a very large penalty. To Willard Mitt Romney it is probably not even pocket change.

The tax code of the US is littered (as The Chief pointed out) with such penalties and exceptions; and they are not taxes. What happened is that the GOP got caught flat footed because they have been high fiving the notion of ACA repeal even as The Chief who is a conservative made it clear in oral arguments that he was trying to uphold the bill…as a true conservative would.

I am making no more comments on the ACA as that is outside this forum. But the GOP lies. They lied about Saddam, they lied about 9/11 they lied about the war, they lie about taxes and Willard simply lies about his entire life. He is now claiming he really wanted to go to Vietnam and fight there, his various deferments to the contrary.

We will never get anywhere in human spaceflight as long as we depend on the “bread and circus” routine…if you have not figured that out…you are part of the problem. RGO

“The fact of the matter is that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have a monopoly on broken promises (a.k.a., lies).”

While that statement is true, your Obama example is not.

Candidate Obama said he “endorsed” the then existing Constellation program goals, but that was before the Augustine Commission found that the Constellation program was in dire financial straits. Doing a reassessment with up-to-date facts should be encouraged in politicians, not discouraged.

The Republican Party of Cuyahoga County (RPCC) on the other hand is trying to make an issue out of something that’s not even official policy – it was a mid-level management study, the kind of study that management is supposed to do when faced with an uncertain budgetary future.

But the really funny thing is that Republican’s are the party that wants to rid the government of as many employees as possible, so they should be celebrating a potential decrease in federal employment levels. However, this being an election year, Republicans are not immune to the desire to say or do whatever it takes to win – something members of their rival party are not immune to either, but this is a clear case of the Republicans being the most blatant.

That they have Griffin, whose fiscal mismanagement led to the cancellation of the largest program in modern NASA history, trying to lend some air of respectability to this farce is pretty funny too.