While Norm see's his job as picking out the five pounds of potatoes that will actually fit in the sack, Florida's Democratic Senator StickMan, sees otherwise. The senator who bills himself as one of the astronaut boys (eyes rolling) met with Augustine and told him to ignore the budget objectives given to him by none other than the President himself.
Now we know who has been reading all those interviews coming out of Huntsville with the former man of no cloth. Perhaps it is time StickMan takes a trip to the Men's Warehouse himself?
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The guy's brain is short circuited.
You can see it in his eyes.
Spaceflight can do that, I hear.
It is absolutely assured that NASA is not going to get more money in any meaningful sense than what the president is allocating. Bill Nelson not withstanding.
The team is at the line. The starting gun has sounded. And they're off!
The 120 day clock has started - seems like it always did just as the rocket cleared the tower! "And the clock has started" was the net words out of the narrator's mouth. Well, all one had to do is either wind it up or plug it in, we didn't need to launch a missile to start a clock.
Come to a consensus in three months on five, somewhat diverse subjects. Can anyone explain why we need to rehash manned space flight history on this voyage? Makes the effort rather diluted one would think - perhaps they will render a Nostradamus like quatrain for us to puzzle over for the next few centuries!
Perhaps the study title should be "Fox Guards Henhouse - The Sequel". After all, they did it on ISS - copy it over, change the dates and publish.
What is your preferred solution if you were running the show? I assume it wouldn't be Ares I+V, but would it be EELV, DIRECT 3.0, Shuttle-C, Atlas Phase II, or EELV+Ares V, shuttle extension or something completely different?
Obama needs to dangle the StickMan's Committee Chairmanship position in front of him and tell him to quit screwing the program up the way he is doing. Nelson's gone space-happy.
I've said this before and I'll say it again: I don't think that Senator Nelson has any agenda except maximising the pork for Florida. This isn't necessarily a bad thing (it could be considered one of the reasons he has that nice office in D.C., after all). However, it does occasionally become a speed bump on the road of progress.
That said, I think that the Honourable Gentleman for Florida is risking making a fool of himself by intervening so early and in such a crass manner. If the Commission reports that his favoured idea is an unworkable money pit/kludge in any reasonable schedule, he is going to be a laughing stock. Hell, he might find himself supporting an option that is worse for the good people of FL than the one chosen by the Commission.
FWIW, I can't see CxP getting the boot any more than shuttle replacement was ever likely at the time of the Challenger accident report. That said, unless the Viceroys are very convincing, I suspect that the Stick and its Big Ugly (foster) Brother are going to get canned just to save money. The likely beneficiary? I'd say some permutation of EELV as CLV, with the long-term aspiration of some kind of commercial Earth-to-LEO service ultimately replacing it, and a DIRECT-like (but likely called anything but that to save blushes) budget-version HLLV.
~
Ben the Space Brit
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