The president signed the bill today. As Jeff Foust notes, the main thing this does is to start the clock ticking on some reporting requirements for the agency. I assume that they’ve already been working on the analyses. I hope that they’re done and released more transparently than ESAS was.
8 thoughts on “NASA Is Authorized”
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Rand, you used to note that space is unimportant. The signature of the bill, while trumpetted by NASA, and followers of the space industry; it was barely a mention on the White House website. Then again, this wasn’t a bill the White House supported until it became obvious it was all Congress was going to give for signature. And, there is still the matter of actually being funded, which no bill exists yet for that.
Still, some uncertainty is finally deminished. That’s really good news.
If anything, I view this is as the start of a 60 day countdown to the end of SDHLV.
The hive-mind over at Nasaspaceflight has become unbearable and Griffin-esque in their single-minded support of DIRECT.
The hive-mind over at Nasaspaceflight has become unbearable and Griffin-esque in their single-minded support of DIRECT.
I don’t think this is fair either to NSF.com or the DIRECT supporters. There is some taking of sides over there and a number of vocal people taking the Direct side, but I challenge you to find any community forum on the web which allows open public discussion and fares better than Nasaspaceflight in dealing with this sort of problem.
Having said that, the administrators have said that there is a significant degree of disruptive and uncivil behavior (for example, apparently following one relatively public figure around and posting shortly after they do). I imagine that this is a warning which will be a prelude to some sort of house cleaning.
First off, I fail to see what’s uncivil or disruptive about commenting immediately after a “public figure” comments, especially if the comments-in-question say nothing abusive, other than offering a dissenting opinion.
Indeed, I think the problem at NSF is that they increasingly sees debate itself as a “problem,” particularly with regard to DIRECT.
Alex, apparently the poster in question is very frequently replying to the “public figure” within a few minutes of a post. I don’t know any details beyond that.
Isn’t amazing how DIRECT supporters can consider themselves so persecuted on a forum with a overwhelming SDHLV support?
Unfortunately the descending level of discourse on that forum is not caused by just a few non-DIRECT posters. It’s hard for EELV supporters to get a word in before getting thread-sniped by certain irate well-known SDHLV/DIRECT supporters.
Oh well… C’est la vie.
Well thank goodness the animation department will have a new job now. I’m looking forward to some new cartoons about space exploration…
Gerry, true. We need more imaginary rockets! Congress must mandate NASA to create 3 imaginary rockets per year, with the goal of increasing that to 5/year by the end of the decade.