As I’ve been predicting for a few days, long-time space appropriations committee chair (and ranking member when his party was out of power) and corrupt representative Alan Mollohan is out.
So there is no doubt that there will be a new chair of that subcommittee next year. The only question now is, who? And what will it mean for space policy?
[Wednesday morning update]
Link is fixed now, sorry.
bad link, http repeated in error
If the Republicans take back the House it could well be Rep. Frank Wolf who is the ranking Republican on it, which would make it very interesting for President’s Obmana’s new policy.
Patrick Kennedy (D-RI) would have been in line for the subcommitee chair, but has already announced he will not be running for Congress in 2010. Next in line is Chaka Fattah (D-PA), who represents several parts of Philadelphia. Basically Fattah is a big city liberal Democrat; a year or so back, when NASA was seeking names for ISS modules, he supported naming one “Colbert.”
Rand, link is still bad at 07:55 EST.
This link shows the ballot counts for the race Mollohan was in:
http://www.dailymail.com/News/statenews/201005110982
Use this link to get to the article Rand mentioned.
His ethics questions and support for Obamacare killed him. Particularly the latter.
I do not care what party they come from. All I care is that someone with some logic enters the picture to reset NASA on an affordable market driven commercial oriented outward looking path based on the VSE. I have had a belly full of pie-in-the-sky Griffin’s Ares and Austine’s Flex-up “just-give-it-up-LEO” give me the money. Please stop get a grip take account of the resources and alternatives at hand and move forward in a focused affordable market enabling manor. A manor that preserves our existing manned space program and begins the gradual logical economically stable transformation towards a more robust commercial involvement based proven track records and accomplishments not mere lip service and hype.