JCR Principal Investigator
Lunar PioneerOver at the
Space Coalition, another report has been posted to show where the probable next U.S. president stands on space exploration, regarding federal spending in general and obligatory congratulations to NASA's on its 50th anniversary in particular.
In less than 100 days either Senator John McCain (R-AZ) or Senator Barack H. Obama (D-IL) will be president-elect of the United States.
Their positions will not decide which of the two will be elected, of course, but at least a hundred thousand among 140 million voters will cast ballots based these positions on America's steadfast commitment to manned space exploration. Both camps feel it is important enough for them to make their positions pretty clear. It wasn't always a priority in presidential politics.
Most reports posted in the blogosphere on McCain and Obama's respective visions for manned spaceflight have mostly been posted by younger Americans who, tending toward the fashionable and also the socially liberal, are loath to report Senator Obama's unconcealed hostility toward NASA and its present policy and seem equally unaware of the reason for the Illinois Senator's ambivalence toward NASA.
No effort better symbolizes "American Exceptionalism."
Senator McCain is presently an enthusiastic booster, though his statements reflect either an ignorance or indifference to certain details of NASA Space Exploration Policy, addressing as he or his Space Policy Guru does the supposed, impending Gap in NASA's logistic support for the International Space Station after Discovery and Atlantis are mothballed in 2010.
Neither nominee is thought likely to bring major changes to NASA or the immediate timetable of the Constellation program. After a divisive battle for the White House and Congress, it's unlikely either would expend precious First 100 Day political capital on making expensive quick changes in NASA's present commitments. The "Out Years," however, are a different story.
President Obama has made clear his belief that NASA no longer "inspires," and has said he would fund expanded social programs with a decade delay in manned lunar exploration, and increase international support, and his supporters in Congress hint at an increased reliance on "automation" in the design of the lunar South Pole-Aitken Station, scaling back permanent manned presence in favor of advances in virtualization. His overall statement ignores NASA's recent history since the Columbia disaster, however, as though the past seven years of near "sea change" in NASA's operations had never occurred.
Obama's statement on NASA seems better suited to 2000 than 2008.
President McCain's statement seems to show that its author is slightly shy of being fully-informed of NASA's full range of function, involving JPL and Aerospace as well as Outer Space, and some the fault for that belongs to the Agency. An increasingly atomized media has done a poor job also of reporting on SpaceX and the progress, even the existence, of NASA's funding for COTS.
Both candidates are in need of a full briefing on just what NASA is and does. Could either name four of NASA's operational centers? A reporter with nothing to lose could have a lot of fun asking some basic questions about the Apollo program, before being banned from the press plane.
Obama may have been just out of diapers when Dr. Armstrong stepped onto the Sea of Tranquillity in 1969. How much the first-term Illinois Senator could have been directly inspired by seeing this live on television past his bedtime is a mystery.
McCain, of course, was in a prisoner of war camp in North Vietnam at the time. Just when and where he first received the news of Apollo 11 would be interesting to know, whether or not he heard the news from his brutal captors and what effect, if any, that news might have had on his jailer and fellow POW's should be a part of our national historic record.
McCain obviously knows what Obama and most Americans do not, that NASA is a creature of Congress, and is associated with presidents in our thinking only because of John Kennedy's remarkable Man on the Moon challenge in front of Congress in 1961. The assassination in 1963 made the matching of his challenge, its incredible fulfillment in those daring manned moon missions later during the Nixon Administration as much a memorial to America's lingering emotional trauma for a murdered president as they were demoralizing to the Soviet Union.
Lyndon Johnson, again, through Congress, was easily the most influential figure in NASA's history. This week NASA remembered President Eisenhower's signing of the NASA charter in 1958, but, as Senate majority leader, Johnson created NASA, and it was to Johnson that Eisenhower deferred.
The statements from McCain and Obama reflect popular opinion about the future of our manned space program as it was six months ago. Since then Congress, controlled by Obama's Democrats, has answered with a billion more in funding than NASA requested, in the midst of the most bitter partisanship in Congress since 1860 iconic Washington liberals like Senator
Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) "worked the pork" for Greenbelt through Appropriations.
And NASA is deliberately spread through the United States because Johnson, in designing NASA in the Senate, tied long-term self-interests in influential States to what he had to know would have to become long-term policy in a short-term nation. As Vice President Johnson led the rarely mentioned National Space Council he had created, and only later, as President he accelerated funding for Gemini and Apollo at a breakneck pace; almost too fast, in retrospect.
Johnson's personal interest in launch schedules in NASA's formative years, added to the legendary power of presidents over space policy. (He died a month after Apollo 17.)
Congress and its half-dozen Representatives of districts where NASA's centers are, and the Senators who represent Florida, Texas, California, Maryland, Ohio, Alabama, etc., together have much more to say about American space policy and funding for NASA than even NASA does, let alone the man or woman who, for a brief time, occupies the White House.
