Moderator Miles O'Brien suggested that there are "no high schools named after robots". Robinson replied "some of those high schools are building robots".

Miles O'Brien is a Baby Boomer that still clings to the Von Braun Paradigm (VBP) of space exploration. Steve Robinson appears to "get" the new view of a more seamless relationship between robotics and human controllers.

He'll talk about it in an inspirational way?

Funny...everytime I hear anyone talk about Obama, its always about how inspirational he is. Funny thing though, is that once people see the details and policies behind that inspiration that people start raising eyebrows.

It'd be nice to see him come to KSC in front of a panel of employees and have them ask him exactly what's going to happen to their jobs once shuttle retires and hear what he says straight face to them.

Mr. Robinson: "1. We need to build/support a strong pool of talented people to ensure the future of space research and to ensure a supply engineers of tomorrow. Inspiration takes many forms. My boss has not talked about space - and when he does he will talk about it in an inspirational way."

His boss *has* talked about space, & it hasn't sounded all that inspirational to me.

Guys, we have to be honest. What we saw happen at this meeting was a panel with Lori being oftenly praised [much to her and her candidate's credit], Mr Floyd who was there to tout his candidate's involvement in space and climate change issues [much to his credit as well], and Dr. Robinson being mostly pounded.

I think the Obama folks are very interesting [and quite fondly I might add] people. You could see that Dr. Steve engaged, most of the time, with Miles in an argument of the past vs. the future. It was great. [I think the future won by the way].

You could see that Miles was intimidated by Steve, i.e. with the "All hat and no cattle" remark at the beginning, and the photo in the "Onion" journal.
I think that out of all the panelists, Dr. Steve articulated the vision of where this country needs to be.

- it is clear that the Obama administration wants to strike a balance between being fiscally responsible, and increasing NASA funding. No objective observer believes that this administration will decrease NASA funding overall, over the long-term.

- Yes manned exploration is important, but having everybody being able to interact with a probe on Mars in real-time will be AMAZING. I don't know about you but I want to be able to influence activity on Mars in some way, without having to move from my chair here at home.

- We may have been fostering false promises, by inspiring kids out there about space exploration, and not having our government feel the urgency to give them the opportunities to make these visions into realities.

I WOULD ARGUE WITH ANYONE, ANYTIME, ANYWHERE THAT "THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WILL [HELP] PRODUCE THE SCIENTISTS THAT ARE GOING TO CHANGE THE FACE OF THIS NATION AND HOW WE VIEW SPACE". At the end of the day, PEOPLE make things happen, right?

Love you guys.

It really doesn't matter what Obama's space policy is or is not. The European Union and the Russians (as well as the Chinese) are the ones that will be at the forefront of human space exploration for next century. The USA had its time and its chance but the American public has no interest so it'll fade out pretty quickly after the space shuttle is done in 2010. Exploration is just simply not an American desire any longer. Right, wrong, or indifferent that's just the way the polls reveal it to be. We'll toss a few robots out there now and then but that's it. This is not unusual. Remember the Portuguese, the Dutch, the English? All great explorers but no longer. Just part of the historical cycle. As far as American humans in space - - we're done.

It would be quite informative and possible depressing for the NASA PR machine, to do a survey of about 300 people, randomly selected, and have them respond to such questions as:

What do you know about the Chandra Space Observatory?

If you knew that the ten year Chandra project cost over 100 million dollars of tax payers money, would you want to know more about it?

Do you think it is important to send astronauts to Mars and what would be reason to do so?

Do you know that there as right now over 30 NASA space missions are exploring the solar system and beyond.

Note: Just a sample of possible questions for this survey