More Insight Into FY 2011 Budget for NASA Commercial Activities

articulating the "walk before you run" approach

Articulating how Constellation pork-preservation will prolong the American human spaceflight gap.

Obama's plan was vague and slowly becoming at odds with his earlier stated goals.
I understand that its hip to call any kind of government spending "pork", but this new plan is an alternative to something that was growing a little too chaotic for most senators tastes.

Commercial developers still get a government payday, NASA gets a procedural overhaul, and we keep more of our in house programs intact for near future operations.

Everyone's happy.

"Walk before you run" doesn't even make sense in this context. Terrible analogy. They're trying to imply you can't work on crew transport until you've delivered food. Completely ridiculous.

These people wouldn't make it two yards in the private sector where you must work hard and not hold back to compete.

Is it apparent to everyone now that the politicians don't care about closing the gap? They don't even want to try.

I understand that its hip to call any kind of government spending "pork"...

Congressional "pork", also known as "Project of Regional Concern" is rather accurate to describe this manner of NASA budget authorization.

The language of this bill includes "...capable of lifting at least 75 metric tons -- should be largely derived from shuttle systems and likely would use solid rocket boosters...".

This is worded precisely for the near-term benefit of aerospace contractor and NASA center regional interests in Utah, Alabama and elsewhere.

Just another example that NASA's enablers in Congress could care less about results-driven spaceflight or even tying it to national economic benefit. This is just a states jobs program.

The committee should stop pretending that we're all fools and just legislate honestly: NASA funding must deliver a minimum jobs quota in Texas, Alabama and Florida - or else.

Isn't this also the kind of language needed to provide direction?
What kind of HLV, how much power does it need, where do we source parts and technical skill from, what are our expectations from outside developers, etc... Granted that its not much, but it could give a foundation to the alternative plan that Obama's ideas were lacking.

I think its obvious that a compromise will be needed if anyone wants to push through a new NASA agenda in the near future.
Holding out for 200 million in commercial dev money and the absolute destruction of all things Griffin just isn't worth scuttling the entire program.

"They're trying to imply you can't work on crew transport until you've delivered food. Completely ridiculous."

Not really. To me it sounds as though they want to see how the perform to an existing contract before awarding new more difficult and critical contracts.

Well I guess the "keep Shuttle flying forever" and "keep Constellation eventhough the aerospace experts that have analyzed all the data have said its not a viable program" crowd are getting what they want---pork jobs that produce nothing but powerpoint charts and keeps us in LEO for the next 30+ years. Bravo !
I can't wait to hear the details on how NASA will be able to basically continue Shuttle and Constellation 'as is' (sans Ares I), with basically the same budget as previous years. Answer is, IT CANT !

Unloading NASA from the burden of running cargo and crew to ISS and maintaining archaic Shuttle technology/infrastructure so it can concentrate efforts on sustainably going beyond earth orbit made perfect sense. Its just too bad that there are just too many folks out there that don't understand this, or care more about pork jobs than our nation's space program. Unfortunately its likely both.