New Issues Emerging on Capitol Hill

Spaceflight policy could takeoff in any direction next week on Capitol Hill, reports Frank Morring, Jr., writer for Aviation Week noting that Congressional staffers worked behind the scenes last week to hammer out differences between the House and Senate versions of new legislation authorizing NASA programs for the next three years; but publicly, the two chambers remained even more divided than before the August recess.

Space Frontier Foundation co-founder Rick Tumlinson writes in the Huffington Post, "those who support what I call the Constellation Hallucination want to block President Obama's plan to re-invigorate our space program that gets NASA back to exploring by kickstarting our commercial NewSpace transportation industry."

Meanwhile, former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, an eminent scholar at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, told the Space Transportation Association in Washington Friday, "We are no longer facing a future in which the administration's proposal is one of the possible outcomes." He went on to say the that differences exist between the [Senate and Hill] "bills, but either represents a substantial practical improvement over the administration's proposal."

Writing in the National Review Online Friday, Rand Simberg suggests that the best option may be that both the Senate and House bills fail. This could be a likely result with the clock ticking on the Congressional calendar rapidly.

Mixing rocket science and political science makes one want to really look hard for the escape pod these days! The best American space program would be if both sides of the commercial and civil space policy debate could win with a government heavy-lift vehicle development for deep space operations and commercial vehicles to ferry astronauts to LEO and the moon.