They’ll get defenstrated either way. The only difference is that Obama will do it quietly, while Romney will brag about it.

Except he won’t . Sorry DCSCA.

House Hearing on SLS/Orion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gACyhupcV7E

Senate Hearing on Mars: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CC5O606KGZ4

That’s actually a fundamentally true statement, though as pointed out, once you get past the first couple of bare-bones launches, you can’t obviously afford SLS payloads. That doesn’t mean you can’t develop mission concepts. The mission calendar for Constellation was developed in some detail, long before there were any plans for any real money for those missions. But the election has NASA planning being done really close to their chest. This isn’t the time to assert “vision”.

If you don’t have a notional mission calendar, you can bet you’re not going to get any money for notional missions. But yes, NASA is regularly stupid enough to think that if you have a notional mission calendar, then you might get money for them. There will be handwaving about lunar telerobotics, Lagrange point habitats and NEO trips.

Of course, if Romney is elected, all those notional plans will get thrown out the window.

And even if NASA leadership was that stupid …

You can fill in those sentences with whatever you want.

After watching the hearing, I can only say that yes, NASA really is that stupid.

There’s no ongoing development for any SLS exploration missions outside MPCV lunar flybys. Per NASA’s own documentation, there is no budget available for such developments until fiscal year 2025, under the current budget or even if the funding laid out in the 2010 NASA Authorization Act was restored. Download and absorb page 7 in this presentation:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewsr.html?pid=38348

“They will be announced in late November, early December to take it out of the hyper political environment of a presidential election.”

Unless NASA leadership is stupid enough to think that “we’re going to keep working on SLS and MPCV for the next 13 years and then maybe we’ll get around to building a lander or something else useful for a mission sometime in the next 20-odd years” is a worthwhile announcement, nothing is going to be announced.

And even if NASA leadership was that stupid, the White House isn’t going to let them announce anything substantively new until sequestration is settled by January, and they know whether department and agency toplines are getting whacked 8% or not.

The question is whether at 2 PM EDT to watch the Senate Commerce Hearing on Mars or the Senate space subcommittee hearing on human and robotic exploration. I think I’ll go for the space subcommittee.

What’s your preference?

The missions for SLS has been and continue to be developed.>>

They are essentially farcical. First none of them are funded; ie they are viewgraphs but little or not money has been allocated to them. Second they are mostly just goofy.

my favorite continues to be the solar power demonstration that JSC cooked up…you know the one that was 5-12 billion dollars for what 50KW of power…

these are people who have far to much time on their hands; doing technowelfare coming up with viewgraphs that will never be more then that…

Robert G. Oler (had to come back to Santa Fe to get enough secure bandwidth for a video conference on the other side of the world…back to GLS and the beach today)