A Missed Opportunity (Update)

Senator Nelson might be thinking of his post-
Senate future. In 2012 he will have completed has second term and be over 70.

ATK, Lockheed Martin, ULA, will all owe him favors. Any guess which one will give him an honorary board position or some lobbying money to play with?

If he's not doing favors for Florida who is he doing favors for?

Yes and, I would hope they are looking for other funding
and customers than NASA.

Commercial space needs lots of customers and providers
competing and finding niches. I hope to see a Dragon and
a Cygnus docked to a Bigelow station whether or not NASA
gets a clue and buys flights. It will take longer but it is to
late to stop without an overt effort there are to many
commercial opportunities involved.

That said it is far to early to say that the administration
won't get much of what it wants out of the process. We
have two appropriation committees to get through and a
reconciliation process. Then everyone will think it over
and do what they think best for their interests. Moreover
this has to get done sooner rather than later or the CR
will go in without congressional or WH input. October 1st.
is the beginning of FY2011 budget year.

It'd be nice to see the whole article without a subscription. (Sigh). I'm too much of a cheapskate.

But generally I agree that the new bill takes the wind out of commercial crew's sails, and apparently sets up the government as a competitor with big pockets. This largely undercuts the goals of the Obama proposal, to initiate a new model of HSF. We're faltering at the challenge, and retreating to the comfortable "Battlestar Galactica" approach. This will give China, Russia, and others the opportunity to get into the low-cost HSF business before the US, and break the virtual monopoly we otherwise could win... the HSF equivalent of Intel's dominance in CPUs.

Same failure of leadership is happening in renewable energy, and we're watching a similar opportunity slip away, to create and win a new market. So we're leaving the Merchant 7 alone to buck the tide, raise their own capital and hurry to get operational, lest the opportunity slip away.

It is unfortunate that NASA management did not get their act together, decide on a deliberate, forthright, honest, and logical way to proceed, and then get Administration and Congressional buy in. Instead it looks like they threw their hands up and said, lets let the political winds blow as they will and we'll get whatever we get - or nothing at all.

Big difference between today's leadership and the leaders of the 60s, 70s and even 80s, all of whom were pretty successful at getting what they were going after.

This article would be better titled "The Empire Strikes Back".

Our only real hope at this point is that the "commercial space rebels" have gained enough base of operations to be able to hold on, and continue to expand their capabilities, while NASA once again pours money and careers down another "Apollo on Steroids" rat hole.

I'm guessing two to three years until the inevitable schedule slips and "technical challenges" start surfacing -- IOC in 2016? Most certainly not. Based on demonstrated track records for empire "build a big rocket" programs over the last 20 years my best guess for IOC: never.

> It is unfortunate that NASA management did not get their act together, decide on a deliberate, forthright, honest, and logical way to proceed

They did. They released so much documentation I didn't read a fraction of it. How much did you read?

I'm not certain why you think it will be 2 or 3 years before the 'new-Orion' schedule will slip. Constellation was slipping pretty reliably by 18 months every year of the program and that was just to first manned flight. Moon missions were so far off it was going to be the next generation that would worry about those.

"The other certainty is that the space entrepreneurs had better start scrambling for fresh capital and private customers if they want to keep their dreams alive."

Entrepreneurs scrambling for fresh capital and customers instead of being funded by the government?! OMG, what has capitalism come to?

"The president has the right idea on space. If only he could get Congress to go along."

This is not the case. Obama only had a small amount of the right ideas.

And congress wisely rejected the worst of ObamaSpace.

If there is another commission, it should be into the Obama adminstrations floundering on it's space policy for a year and half and then regurgitating up of policy that was undigestable to congress.

There was no attempt at socializing it before congress, there was no insight into how it was concieved, there was no attempt to build a consensus for it first, it's champions seemed unexcited about it themselves, though they told us how bold and exciting it was over and over. It generated critics out of many of America's space heroes and started a space policy civil war. It created space malaise and lost jobs.

Someone ought to write a book about this disasterous side journey to the stars.

The author is overly predictive of course of failure going forward for NASA under the compromise plan. It comes off more as sour grapes over substance however, (popular stance for ObamaSpace supporters right now apparantly) and sadly even as championing failure for NASA going forward and want to say "I told you so" more then helping NASA succeed.

That attitude from some is another sad product of the space policy civil war that Obama started and was totally unnecessary.

Obama could have channeled JFK for NASA going forward. He could have shown true interest, visit the pad, wear the cool sunglasses gazing up at the stack, talk of optimistic future in space for America, INSPIRE! back NASA's moon goals (reform Constellation, it's what happened anyways! LOL) AND also champion commercial as well.

A missed opportunity indeed.

> Entrepreneurs scrambling for fresh capital and customers instead of being funded by the government?! OMG, what has capitalism come to?

Government is a customer of commercial space.

Government funds welfare for very poor people and very powerful businesses.

Do you understand the difference now?