ISS is going to prove extremely important in the future…dont look now but shortly there will be a battle to see where “India” goes in terms of its space future…ie the chinese or the US…the Chinese fired the opening salvo this weekend. RGO

there are three absurd statements in your post

1. Eric A…the guy who was praising Obama’s space policy before he decided to land on it in a space news op ed. Does the Tea Party in space really support that kind of thinking?

2. Both the Obama and Romney space plans stink.

Like it or not like it Obama has a plan…romney has a promise for a conference which no one has a clue what it is going to come up with and then what Romney will actually do…since Romney can say different things to different groups on the same topic its hard to see how that qualifies as anything

3. on the one hand you praise Obama for COTS and Commercial crew and then say he gets no credit for MSL because “Bush started it”. Bush started commercial cargo as well.

you have cleared up nothing Robert G. Oler

ISS has a geopolitical rationale quite separate from space, and the counterpoint to Apollo. Instead of demonstrating American supremacy, it can build trust and understanding between nuclear adversaries. That was why Congress finally funded it under Clinton, and that is why we should invite China to join.

ISS’s most important pure-spaceflight role, IMHO, is to serve as a destination for all the new surface-to-LEO systems under development, particularly RLVs, until the cost of human spaceflight can be reduced to a level at which human spaceflight becomes practical on a larger scale.

Unfortunately people like Posey appeal to many on the Space Coast who see Republicans as godlike and Democrats as (to quote a local AM radio host) “evil incarnate”. Demonization of your opponents is an old and honored political tradition.

However even Posey cannot demonize Shannon Roberts. Unlike Posey she is educated, experienced, considerate of the views of others, and always constructive in her actions. Unlike Posey she knows an asteroid from a meteorite, and how to work with the administration. She is exactly the person the Space Coast needs in Congress.

You can not shout “american exceptionalism” unless America has the biggest phallic symbol. It is not about sustainablity, it never has been, it is about having something, like a security blanket, that says to the rest of the world, look at us, look how great and strong and … exceptional … America is.

Another command would be that any system or sub-system proposed for any NASA program or project and projected to cost more than a million dollars shall be put out for bid. Only if no credible bids were offered would NASA be allowed to build it in-house.

I don’t know if these directives would help and I sincerely doubt such a technique would be adopted but I sure would like to see what would happen.
—

Leave it to the Tea Party to set the record straight… Both the Obama and Romney space plans stink.

In the case of the President, even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in awhile. And to the President’s credit, he has done a good job guiding both COTS and the CCDev programs along. However, he has not championed his successes in space like he has Obamacare or his Supreme Court nominees. He leaves General Boldin and Lori Garver out in the wind to fend for themselves (and it doesn’t help when Seth is MIA when the budget cutters come to the NASA budget and he is nowhere to be found).

Romney’s plan for space should scare the hell out of every conservative who loves space. If you look at his space advisory panel he can go one of two ways. Mr. Romney has put Eric Anderson on his panel and that is very positive. However, the good Dr. Griffin is also there and we at TPIS can totally see more time and billions wasted trying to ensure SLS morphs into something as close as possible to CxP.

President Obama should not get any extra-ordinary credit for MSL. That was started under the Bush administration. In fact, we will not see any of President Obama’s space accomplishments, other than COTS and CCDev, until either his second term or Romney’s first…

… and this is the real problem. NASA programs need to be tightened up to where we do not have to wait 18 to 20 years to see marvelous things. Things like the Ed Weiler Space Telescope just suck down resources that could be used for real astrophysics programs. Even MSL fell behind.

In closing — The ever expanding NASA bureaucracy is expanding to support the ever expanding NASA bureaucracy.

Respectfully,
Andrew Gasser
TEA Party in Space

Now that we’ve established what you’re really all about, we can move on.

I think a lot of the SLS supporters are the people who are in a hurry to go somewhere.

What’s their hurry? If its not sustainable it will be another flash in the pan, just like Apollo, and we’ll be left with nothing. These people would be very happy with a singular Orion flight around the moon, I guess. Personally I wonder what for?

ISS is pretty important to learn lessons, whether developing technology or human research, that we need in order to make long distance flights to planets or other destinations months away. So I do not know why people are anxious to be rid of it. How do they think we will learn these things?

I can say that the ISS program has been pretty poorly managed for a long time. I think the US gave away too many responsibilities to its “partners” in the name of saving the US taxpayer money. I dont think they saved the US taxpayer anything, but they did give away lots of expertise and shortchanged the US people on revenues. The program has taken far too long. It has cost far too much money. Its the same issues now with Orion and SLS and previously with Constellation, but with many of the same people running the show, its no wonder. The people who managed the ISS program (and who still manage the program) forgot what the ISS program was about, which is why they are doing so little and such poor science or technology development on-board presently. These people wasted tens of billions of dollars and a decade of needed work.

What an incredibly low bar.