Watching something you care deeply about working its way through Congress is utterly exhausting, and usually a little depressing. So it is with the US Space Program and me. There's a grudge match brewing, it's bizarro world with the usual partisan roles flipped in some cases, and like most pieces of legislation and especially those involving change, there's a lot of money and jobs riding on the outcome either way.
Ultra fast recap: The Shuttle Columbia disaster brought home in the most tragic way possible that America's shuttle fleet was aging and would soon have to be retired. There was no manned US rocket in development to replace it. In 2005 President Bush decided on a big government rocket program with the moon as a stepping stone to Mars called Constellation. For the first year or two Constellation didn't hog too many NASA resources, but over time it would eventually cost between 50 and 100 billion dollars by most estimates. That funding never came close to materializing. Without it, by 2008 the program was already falling way behind schedule, and like most red-blooded US politicians, George Bush kicked that can o'worms down the road to the incoming President.
Obama comes in, sets up a study of the issue usually referred to as the Augustine Commissions, which found as expected that Constellation was so underfunded and behind schedule that it was unrealistic. In the middle of the worst economy since 1930, a fully funded, twenty-year, $50 billion plus Mars rocket program didn't have much of a chance. So the WH proposed killing the two most expensive parts of Constellation before they gobbled up more billions, and investing a much smaller sum of money in emerging commercial space companies collectively referred to henceforth as Newspace. This was done in the belief Newspace would be able to provide NASA the basic services NASA was losing with the shuttle -- mainly human and human cargo transport to Low Earth Orbit and the ISS -- at a much lower cost and much faster than NASA acting alone. And an immediate mixed-up crazy-ass turf war broke out between everyone.
In this bizarre war, the GOP tended to oppose anything Obama did thus forcing them by default to reject good old capitalism and support Bush's Big Government high dollar Constellation. Dems and Repubs in districts in districts and states that would benefit the most from Constellation especially lined up against Obama and Newspace.
Two bills now sit in each house of congress. The Senate bill is the usual watered down pablum, but in another bizarro twist, it's actually better than the House version. The Senate bills tries to half ass Newspace, and ends Constellation after letting a few projects that will never serve any purpose -- other than making a company some money -- continue for a bit longer than they should. The House version starves Newspace to the point of death, thus cutting off any hope of a US rocket for years, and resurrects a token Constellation program. The freaking House bill does the exact opposite of properly fund Constellation -- which is what the Augustine Commission said had to happen in the first place for it to be realistic.
Which ever way it goes, some people will make money and get jobs while another group will lose both (I suppose that's kind of a wash as long as you're not one of them). After looking at it for going on three years, I come down on the side of Newspace for reasons I'll be writing about this month and next. So I like the Senate bill better, as written anyway, than the House bill, even though they both suck. And I'll be following this and writing about it through September, or as long as I can stand to anyway.
