Congress still focusing on Constellation

I came across an article from the blog: Commercial Space Watch (link below) where the Greater Houston Partnership and the Bay Area Houston Economic Partnership are petitioning the Obama administration to save the Constellation program and reconsider retiring the Shuttle program, and yesterday (June 28th) Congress introduced legislation to forbid NASA from canceling any program or starting any new program before Congress signs off on it. They are doing this in the name of "Saving Manned Space Flight"

I can't think of a better way to hamstring our manned space flight program than to tie the hands of the people with the expertise to run it by forcing them to continue to use the Shuttle, an expensive system to begin with and only costing more money as time goes on and continuing to fund a program that will in all likelihood cost us more and fall short of it's goals: returning us to the Moon and getting us to Mars. All of the people tasked with understanding the problems of our exploration of space and who's job it is to come up with solutions... ALL of them, say that NASA's new approach will save us money, will generate more missions, advance our manned program more than anything else before and will ultimately get us to Mars sooner than with Constellation. Even the critics can only come up with two problems, the jobs that will be lost and possibly (but not proven) more time using Russian rockets to get our people into space before we get our capability back.

I dislike the gap between the shuttle and the "next rocket" that will take humans into space probably more than anyone in Congress does. It was the previous administrations fault that we had not even begun to develop a new man-rated launch system to replace the shuttle before the shuttle ended up costing too much for us to justify using anymore. The original pressures to retire the shuttle haven't gone away and with the state the economy is in, they are actually worse. Now in order to fix that problem, we turned back to the people who gave us the shuttle and ask them to do it again, using the same process that created the massive cost overruns and capability cuts that afflicted the shuttle. We can't afford it. Constellation should never have been begun, certainly not as one grand plan to replace the shuttle, take us back to the Moon and beyond to Mars. The gap is no one's fault if it isn't Bush and the NASA administrators that came before Bolden. There is only one thing worse than beginning a project only to cancel it a year or two later, and that is to continue a project that is faulty, yet this is what Congress would have us do.  We're not in the position of making a decision that will satisfy everyone and solve all our problems.  It's worse than that.  We're in a position of making the most out of a bad situation.  It's going to hurt, but fear of getting hurt should make us make the wrong decision simply because it partially cures the immediate symptoms but does nothing about the causes.

We're not going to lose all the money that went into it. NASA is already taking steps to ensure that useful technology programs started under Constellation are continued, so what's with all the scare tactics? This brings us back to jobs. Losing jobs is never a good thing, but deciding whether to cancel a project or not should not be governed by simply how many jobs will be lost. Otherwise we would never cancel any project and we would be out of money in short order. Then EVERYONE loses their job. I don't think Congress or the GHP/BAHEP are concerned with the direction our space program is going. They are concerned with keeping their people (not necessarily those who deserve it) employed and in the case of Congress, keeping their constituents happy.

And even if it turns out we don't have the capability to get our people to LEO for seven years, that is hardly the end of our space program even if the worst comes to pass and it is the end of NASA. Companies like Space X were going already, before NASA signed on. They are headed already in LEO and are heading beyind with or without NASA's permission or support. It may not be the government doing it, but Americans are not going to be kept out of space. Not even close. We're on the verge of a renaissance in space exploration. We're on the verge of going from government control to civilian control and the turning point is only a few years away, and all this in the middle of a recession no less. This new direction NASA is headed is the right way to go by any yardstick you care to use unless you're still suffering the notion that control still belongs with NASA, and I don't happen to believe that.  All they really need to do is stay out of the way and advise, but wouldn't it be cool if they could also help?