Henry Vanderbilt says it’s time to call your Congressperson again. This is fairly urgent.
[Update a while later]
I would add that other partisan spin for the Republicans is that the House bill would ensure our continued dependency on the Russians for ISS support for the indefinite future, and force us to continue to waive the requirements of the Iran/North-Korea/Syria Non-Proliferation Act (INKSNA), letting them evade their responsibilities to follow its dictates.
[Friday update]
Folks, you can say you want to support the Senate bill if you want (per comments) but the key thing is to oppose the House bill.
Sigh. Every time we have another of these calls for action I’m getting more and more convinced that governments shouldn’t run civil space programs at all. This is what you get if you are doing manned spaceflight with other people’s money. Not a reason not to heed the call to action, but a reason to be sad.
Well, NASA is likely to be funded for some sort of visible civil space program for a while yet. Being able to tell ourselves when all else is going wrong “but at least we’re the ones who can go to the Moon” is too important a prop for the US national self-image, as I see it. (Never mind the one-time circumstances that made us willing to do it the brute-force amazingly expensive way…) But given that there will be a NASA exploration program of some sort, we should at least try to see that the money is spent halfway usefully.
As a number of people have pointed out, the ultimate goal is for National Geographic Society, or a major university consortium, to be able to sponsor a Mars mission. This is one step in that direction.
I just made my own phone call, and for what it’s worth, I got a staffer who was not at all aware of the issue, and obviously didn’t track what I said the first time through. After she said, let her make a note, I backed waaay off on the level of detail on the second go-round. HR 5781 is a really bad bill, please ask the Congressman to ask the Majority Leader not to put it on the calendar at all, just kill it. That’s the needed result, I think – a note for the boss saying a constituent called wanting him to kill 5781.
The argument that the government is going to spend the taxpayer’s money anyway, so may as well try and get at least a little of it spent productively, always seems a little complicit to me.
If the same lobbying effort was instead expended on the private investment community, showing them how incompetent NASA is and how much more they could accomplish by spending a ~hundredth as much, would this ultimately achieve more or less for space?
What is the most effective use of lobbying effort here? Is government still worth lobbying? Are there better options?
Pete – saying they’ll spend it anyway, so we might as well get our share of the loot would indeed strike me as complicit. Saying they’ll spend it anyway, so let’s work to see that as much as possible is spent well, not so much. Your mileage may vary.
Talking to the private investment community has been ongoing for a generation now. (Where do you think SpaceX, Blue Origin, et al came from? Or Paul Allen’s sponsorship of SpaceShip 1? For that matter, where did ULA’s recent entrepreneurial streak came from? Those ideas didn’t just appear out of the aether.) It’s a separate effort largely done in a different way than lobbying Congress; there’s no real competition for resources. After all, not many of us are looking at our Congressman’s phone number, and looking at Bill Gates’s phone number, and trying to decide “which do I use my one phone call on?” (So make the call already!)
As I’ve repeated in other comment threads; we were told Barack would never let us go back to our lives. In the case of space advocates, this has been the case since the creation of NASA. So long as government runs/regulates industries, we are compelled to participate in the political process rather than enjoy our freedoms. True progress is making a move to a more limited government, otherwise you’ll never overcome the entropy inherent in the system.
Leland – I’m not sure it’s a totally either/or thing. Yes, NASA transitioned from being the solution for space to being (in significant part) a problem a long time ago. Yes, a bunch of us periodically and reluctantly get dragged into trying to fix some aspect of NASA. X-33 ate my nineties, and I’m far from alone in that. But participating in the political process doesn’t exclude enjoying our freedoms. Cuts into our time for it, yes, that it does. I’ll leave politics alone gladly, anytime politics reciprocates…
Well, I made the call at 0800 local, 0900 DC time. The staffer I talked to sounded like a twentysomething intern who clearly didn’t know much about the issue.
That makes sense. I doubt my congresscritter knows much, either — his constituency is mainly farmers who lurvs them some ag subsidies, and he’s very good at trading around to get more.
One point I did try to make is that 5781 is blatant pork-barreling that isn’t going to look too good to the tea partiers. I don’t know if it will have any impact or not; we’ll see.
Regards,
Ric
I called my Representative and told them I strongly support S.3729 and strongly oppose HR. 5781.
(I actually called my parents rep too 😉 )
Keep the message simple and to the point. Too much detail is not your friend.
Would it help or hurt if you respectfully described yourself as an irate citizen?
Don’t leave yourself as “citizen” MPM, you want to be a “primary voting constituent and activist.”
Didn’t the L5 Society have a bumper sticker that said “I’m pro space and I vote.” Maybe you should send a jpg of that to your Congresscritter along with your disapproval of the House train wreck.
Heheh, good advice. If I were a US citizen I would have called my senator.
Henry,
I’m a contactor, so I’m not in a hurry for either/or at the moment. At the same time, I certainly understand the ultimate folly of nationalized industries, as can be seen in this post. I was really responding to Pete’s “is government still worth lobbying?” It is an inefficient use of our time to tell government how to better run an industry, but for now, it has to be done.
From space-access.org:
“Update Monday 9/13/10 – HR.5781 is not on the House calendar for this week […]. Our sources tell us that at least in part due to a significant number of constituent calls late last week, the House Leadership does not (currently) intend to put HR.5781 on the calendar this session (at least not in its current form.) We hear that negotiations with Senate Authorizers continue, with the outcome (if any) now more likely to be based on the Senate bill. So, the battle is going well – to everyone who made a contact so far, thanks! […]”