More Bad PR For The Obama Space Plan

"Deputy Administrator Lori Garver and other agency officials asked a gathering of mostly academic space organizations for help with the plan in Congress, after barring reporters from the meeting."

No transparency there!
And it's obvious why, it was an intentional effort to craft a one sided "consensus" of cherry picked sources.
Yet, even that appears to have failed.

Hm... so I guess this is the current tally for Augustine Committee members for/against the new plan for NASA:

For (5 so far): Norm Augustine, Sally Ride (participated initial roll-out), Leroy Ciao (at least the commercial aspects), Jeff Greason (esp. propellant depots), Ed Crawley (came out with white paper supporting new plan)

Partially against (1 so far): Lester Lyles (favors boost to essential parts of NASA like technology development, science, and aeronautics), but wants additional definition on HSF)

Anybody know the positions of Wanda Austin, Bohdan Bejmuk, Chris Chyba, or Charles Kennel?

"It makes no more sense to have a NASA with an under-emphasis on human spaceflight than it did to have a NASA with an over-emphasis."

Okay...

I don't think we even need an official statement from Bohdan Bejmuk, his comments during the Augustine meetings speak for themselves IMO:

(my emphasis)
http://www.nasa.gov/382774main_081209_DC_Transcript.txt

So you actually destroy part of NASA, you give it to the guys who today participate in mission assurance and also provide independent savvy to contractors -- and I was contractors and I used to have NASA guys, smart guys, looking over my shoulders to make sure that I don't goof up and, God know, I did enough of that. So you'd like to get rid of it. So you would -- so that scenario would get rid of that.

You would abandon what we do well -- what we have developed doing well over several decades and learn what Russians have done well or buy their product, you know, in terms of propulsion, and more importantly -- most importantly, NASA really doesn't build things. NASA buys things. On these major programs typically NASA spends in-house about 20 percent. They buy from contractors about 80 percent.

And somehow you take -- you beat up NASA, you push them back, you say you guys go and do something else or get laid off -- and, you know, I -- and turn it over to the guys who take -- today provide 80 percent, you know, of services and goods for NASA budget and somehow out of that you're supposed to come with this huge savings. And I think it just violates common sense, in my mind.

I think what's going to happen is we'll create havoc that will probably last -- I don't know -- five years, ten years. You know, there will be -- NASA is not, by the way, very easily directable. I've been interacting -- I've been NASA's contractor forever. So they'll fight in the end and that flight will create a lot of instability, havoc, and when the dust is finally settled -- it could be a decade later -- we will wonder what have we done.

And Norm said something today which was very wise, and I clearly agree with it. Stability is important. You know, small deviations from your direction are tolerable.

You know, if we think that NASA has too much infrastructure, we ought to make a strong recommendation to NASA -- reduce your infrastructure, be a little more effective, efficient.

But saying we are going to do this by telling them -- well, first of all, we don't tell anybody anything. We provide options. But providing an option which -- which somebody may think this is actually a pretty good idea, get NASA out of this business, create this situation and hope that at the end you will be doing business at lower costs.

And even you guys use this word chance. Do you really want to provide an option that will leave the future of America in space to chance? I don't know. I've got a little problem with that.