Briefs: Senate hearing panel; Constellation vs Shuttle; Bolden's talk

Jeff Foust has three items of interest today on his Space Politics blog, including the list of panel members that will testify at tomorrow's Senate hearing on "Assessing Commercial Space Capabilities": Witnesses for Senate commercial space hearing.

Looks like four who will back the capability of commercial companies to provide crew transport and three who will argue against it.
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Jeff discusses efforts by politicians in states affected by the Constellation cancellation to reverse the decision: Congressional delegations rally for Constellation.

BTW, A fundamental aspect of the Constellation plan was to use money freed up by ending the Shuttle program. Buzz Aldrin points out also that the Shuttle launch pads would start to be modified for the Ares vehicles after the end of the Shuttle flights. These and other facts imply that Shuttle program extension and saving Constellation, i.e. Ares I/Orion, are incompatible, at least within likely NASA budget limits. Any compromise over the NASA plan will therefore have to weigh jobs in Florida vs jobs in Utah and Alabama. (Don't know which option means more jobs for Texas.)

Although Shuttle extension would use up money that could be more effectively spent on crucial technology development, at least it would most likely be paired with commercial crew transport development.
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Jeff reviews Bolden's speech yesterday : Bolden attacks the "myths" about NASA's new plan.

In the Q&A following the speech, Bolden

said that he sees access to LEO “as something that belongs in the commercial sector.” “Commercial is about making money,” he continued, “and I think there are incredible opportunities for money to be made with commercial access to low Earth orbit.” NASA was willing to pay for to transport crews to the ISS, and perhaps later, he suggested, even manage access to the station as the agency tries to get out of more routine operations. “We at NASA want to get our of the operational business,” he said. “We don’t want to manage low Earth orbit anymore. We want to use it, but we want to give it over to commercial entities who can use it for profit. I know that’s hard for some people to grasp.”

Posted 03/17/10 | 10:31:25 by TopSpacer | Filed under: Space policy

Comments

"What we are trying to do is to develop multiple, redundant, made in America
capability for access to LEO. So we’ll never again be dependent on just one provider."

- Charles Bolden

Anybody who remembers the aftermath of the destruction of the Challenger and Columbia (as is firmly etched into the mind of Charles Bolden I'm sure) know full well that a critical flaw or catastrophic failure can shut down spaceflight for years and hurt in so many ways that this should be head-smacking obvious.

To give a good analogy, if only one company made only one kind of airplane for commercial passenger travel and that same aircraft was discovered to have a critical engineering flaw that caused a fatal landing about 2% of the time, the FAA would yank the air worthiness certificate on that aircraft in a New York minute and effectively ground all commercial passenger travel. There is a pretty good reason why there are still multiple companies building a wide variety of aircraft that are used for what is now a critical national infrastructure.

Space travel should be no different. This is really like a breath of fresh air for me coming from the guy at the top of NASA, and my esteem for him keeps growing day by day.

I just hope that at the Space Summit that the leading star of the show will be Bolden and not Obama. It will be a media circus anyway, but this man really needs to take the lead on what is going on here. Doing so couldn't hurt Obama either, and it may even give Obama a much needed political boost too.

Posted by Robert Horning at 03/17/10 18:14:00

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