Bush's Fun House Mirror Vision for Space

by Thomas Gangale
18 June 2008

Monday's Office of Management and Budget statement opposing H.R. 6063, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Authorization Act of 2008, is as full of deliberate distortions as a fun house mirror. Naturally, it sticks up for the President's "Vision" to end the Space Shuttle program as quickly as possible, despite the fact that the Administration never came up with a plan to keep American astronauts commuting to the mostly-American International Space Station during a five-year gap while a new manned spacecraft is developed. It also sticks up for the President’s decision not to fly an already-built billion-dollar instrument.

Congress intends to restore three Space Shuttle flights. Since the bill anticipates that the three flights will occur in 2010, it is not "effectively superseding the 2010 Shuttle retirement date that is a critical step to enabling successful development of the Crew Exploration Vehicle." The OMB statement is clearly false, given that throughout 2007, NASA's schedule held firmly to a retirement date of July 2010, and this year NASA actually pulled that date ahead to April 2010. What are the odds that in the remaining eight months of 2010, NASA could get three "additional" missions off the pad?

Not bad, I'd say... especially since two of them have been on the launch schedule for four years.

NASA's Consolidated Launch Manifest lists ULF-4 and ULF-5 as contingency flights, under review, to establish a six-person crew capability on the ISS. Gee, might it make sense to fly a couple of shuttle missions to double the size of the ISS crew from 2010 to 2016 and beyond, and do a lot more science during that period than three people can do? I guess so! Also, there's nothing new that Congress is adding in this bill... except money; it is only restoring what Bush's "Vision" forced NASA to roll back from "no foolin', we're gonna fly 'em" missions to "contingency" missions, meaning "it sure would be nice if Congress would give us the money." These two missions were part of the baseline flight manifest at least as far back as 2004, around the time that Bush was off somewhere having his "Vision." So, just what exactly are the risks of turning contingency missions that were originally baseline missions back into baseline missions again, other than to the Administration's credibility? The bill provides new money to fly these missions, rather than robbing the Orion program to pay for them, so why would this delay "the operational capability of the Orion CEV?"

The other "additional" mission isn't really an addition, either. The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer cost a billion dollars to build, so maybe spending a few million dollars to actually fly the thing would be a prudent use of taxpayers' money, huh? How much science are we getting out of it while it sits in a clean room?

Back in December, the Fox Business Channel brought me into a San Francisco studio at 4am to have a goofy debate with Ed Hudgins, formerly of the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute, now the executive director an Ayn Rand cult called the Atlas Society. I wonder how long this guy can keep stepping to the right before he falls off the planet. The occasion was the scheduled launch of STS-122, which at one time was intended to carry the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the ISS. Naturally, it being "fair and balanced" Fox, it was an ambush. The moderator let Hudgins rant repetitious slogans about the grounding of the spectrometer as an example of government waste, and as I was gearing up to verbally beat Hudgins' arguments to a bloody pulp, what do you know, Fox was suddenly out of time. Even the studio technician was startled. "Man, that was a hard 'out!'" Anyway, I confidently predicted on-camera that Congress would come up with the money to fly the spectrometer, and it has made a brave beginning to do that. Gangale 1, Hudgins 0.

Of course, the NASA authorization bill has only been reported out of the House Science Committee, so it has a long way to go before it reaches the President's desk. Still, if these courageous provisions survive in the bill, a presidential veto of a NASA bill would be a shocking historical precedent. I say to Congress, hang tough, you're doing the right thing with the people's money, call his bluff.

However the NASA authorization bill ends up, funny thing about these "government is the problem" libertarians... if the government writes off a billion-dollar spectrometer, they call it waste; when the private sector writes down a hundred billion dollars in sub-prime loans, they call it a business decision. Could this be why Atlas shrugged?