As others have put it – if your plan is to increase NASA funding, show me the votes in Congress, the Senate and the White House. Otherwise your plan is as realistic as building a hyper drive.

Current NASA spending is supported by a group of concerned Senators and Congress criters (money spent in their states), a small smattering of genuine space cadet politicians (belivers), backers from the STEM concept and (by far the largest) those who vote for NASA spending as part of a deal on spending on their own favored projects.

Trying to build the alliance by spreading the work across as many states as possible via FAR project control has resulted in staggering bloat. The same happens of course for all the DOD programs run the same way. Then the project gets cancelled anyway. New project….

“China: NASA mistakenly banned Chinese researchers from conference”

We’re not so lucky though, since we have to listen to your inane comments…

There’s another option, namely to neither read nor reply to posts by trolls.

The scroll wheel on my computer’s mouse gets quite the workout on this forum.

“An upside of the shutdown is that establishment Republicans are being driven from the party.”

I wouldn’t be so sure. The people that decide who is driven out are the voters, and right now the polls show a stronger dislike of the Tea Party than the Republican Party. We really won’t know how this plays out until the next elections are held.

But before the elections, non-Tea Party candidates are not doing as well in fund raising as their potential opponents. Even the Koch brothers are not happy with what the Tea Party was doing with the shutdown, and the Koch brothers are the true fathers of the Tea Party – that can’t be good.

I wouldn’t be counting your lemming’s until the fat lady sings…

“…to date, “commercial human spaceflight companies’ have failed to even attempt to orbit anybody.”

Well of course they haven’t, and that’s because they haven’t even tried – which is the biggest point you keep missing.

Or to use your own phase, “False equivalency, of course.”

The government had a different goal with the Gemini program than commercial companies have in working on their crew transportation systems. And they don’t have a Cold War edict driving them, nor access to +2% of the Federal Budget.

They could care less what your measurement of success is… but luckily for them they aren’t even aware of your existence. We’re not so lucky though, since we have to listen to your inane comments…

Pfft. False equivalency, of course.

And as a reminder, given the passing of Scott Carpenter, Project Mercury- a pioneering government space project of scale- ended over fifty years ago with six successful manned spaceflights crewed by astronauts- four of them being orbital flights. Since 1963, to date, “commercial human spaceflight companies’ have failed to even attempt to orbit anybody.

Establishment Republicans hate Ted Cruz, that’s news? The schism has been obvious since McCain’s “wacko birds” comment. An upside of the shutdown is that establishment Republicans are being driven from the party. Ted Cruz’s hand was strengthened.

I suspect the same thing about the about the House vote we just saw. I’m willing to bet that the vast majority of the GOP members just wanted the shutdown over and done with but, knowing that the bill would pass, which it eventually did at 285-144, they felt safe voting against it for show. Good insurance for the next primary. One wonders how many of those 144 members who went on record opposing the bill were thinking that way.