Jeff Foust - Space Politics

As I know I've mentioned before, Jeff Foust is one of the most prolific and useful contributors to the wider conversation about Space Exploration happening on the Internet. He's never one to Cry Wolf, so, generally speaking, when Jeff write, we read it.

A short time ago Jeff posted his own perspective of recent speculations concerning the time being taken by the new administration to pick a successor to Michael Griffin as NASA administrator:

Lane on his report and the NASA administrator search

Last week I noted here the mixed reception from former astronauts to a the recent policy paper by George Abbey and Neal Lane, one that proposed foregoing a return to the Moon in favor of more of an emphasis on energy and environment research, as well as long-term planning for missions to near Earth objects. What other response has that report generated?

I had an opportunity last weekend at the AAAS conference in Chicago to ask Lane, after a panel session about the future of the OSTP (Lane was President Clinton’s science advisor), what sort of feedback he’d received. “Mostly favorable,” he said. He alluded to Cernan’s opposition to the proposal that was published by the Houston Chronicle, but wasn’t surprised since Cernan is “still kind of a space nut. He wants to go go go, out to Mars.”

Lane, by comparison, doesn’t think the nation is interested in human missions to the Moon and Mars. “It would be fine to go to the Moon if there was a reason to go to the Moon, and the people wanted to, but they don’t,” he claimed. “People don’t care about going back to the Moon and there’s no rationale for going back to the Moon. I would really like to see NASA go forward in a big way and have a larger and more exciting space program. But right now there’s not the support for it, and NASA’s flailing.”

That’s why, he said, he and Abbey decided that NASA would be better advised to focus on “solving the energy problem” and build public support for the agency that could be leveraged for other missions in the future. “If we keep blowing all our money on Constellation there will be nothing left,” he said.

Read the rest at SPACE POLITICS

I would be a heck of a lot more interested in what Dr. Schmitt has to say about Lane's comments, frankly, and I feel sorry for anyone who would dare call Captain Cernan "a space nut." It marks Lane as either ignorant or covertly hostile to an eventual future beyond the reach of central planning. This Zero-Sum mentality if really getting on my nerves. - JCR