Sometimes Congress isn't totally clueless. The new launch legislation passed today.

It certainly sounds like Chairman Boehlert gets it:

"This is about a lot more than 'joy rides' in space, although there's nothing wrong with such an enterprise. This is about the future of the U.S. aerospace industry. As in most areas of American enterprise, the greatest innovations in aerospace are most likely to come from small entrepreneurs. This is true whether we're talking about launching humans or cargo. And the goal of this bill is to promote robust experimentation, to make sure that entrepreneurs and inventors have the incentives and the capabilities they need to pursue their ideas. That's important to our nation's future."

Now on to the Senate. I hope they don't screw it up too much.

Listening to NPR an hour ago, they had a story about how frivolous Congress is now that it is an election year--most bills will be symbolic or non-controversial.

They led with the example of the Commercial Space Launch Act and then played a clip of Congressman Steny Hoyer criticizing this as a piece of meaningless legislation that will do nothing to solve the problems currently facing Americans.

Friday morning they will have a story about the Hubble Space Telescope on "Morning Edition."

(An unrelated sidenote: I notice that the comments software you use allows someone to review a post, but not to edit it. So if you review it and find a mistake, you have to cancel it and re-do it. I have noticed that the software used on www.spacepolitics.com does allow you to edit your comments after reviewing them.)

I'm going to be doing an upgrade in the next couple days that I hope will solve that problem, Dwayne.

Bravo for the House! I share your hope that the Senate won't mess it up.

Dwayne, try hitting your back button on your browser. It should bring up the original. (Though I agree there should be a way to edit a preview.)

There is no back button, Kathy--it's a popup window. If one hits the back button on the original page, it just switches active windows. At least that's what happens in Mozilla. MT still hasn't straightened this out in v2.661?

I use the ALT-BackArrow combo. Yep, it works.

<backspace> always works for me when there's no Back button.

Dwayne wrote:

"...played a clip of Congressman Steny Hoyer criticizing this as a piece of meaningless legislation..."

Interesting.

At the moment, the roll-call vote for
H.R. 3752 is on-line at:

http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2004/roll039.xml

The bill passed 402 to 1, with 30 members
not voting.

As you can see from the roll call, Rep.
Hoyer (D-MD) voted Yea -- in FAVOR
of the legislation.

I can't imagine Hoyer not liking this bill. It's not in character. I haven't heard the NPR report but I worked in DC for a while, and met the Honorable Mr. Hoyer once. Someone please verify.

Of course, the "1" in the 402-1 vote was Ron Paul (R-TX, whose district covers the area between Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and Corpus Christi). The man seems to have never met a bill he won't vote against. His district includes Matagorda Island, one possible location for a commercial space launch facility in Texas - and the launch site for Deke Slayton's Conestoga I back in 1982, the first private rocket launch.

Hoyer's comment was not so much against the bill, as it was simply rhetoric to make the point that the current (Republican-controlled) Congress is not concerned with the problems of normal folks.

I did not listen to much of the rest of the piece, but it had little to do with the act. It was about how Congress behaves in an election year.

Don't be dissing on Ron Paul now! ;-) Ron was the Libertarian Party candidate in '87 and consistently votes the way I think alot of us here would if given the chance. I personally divorced myself from my current representative and claim Ron as my real Rep.

On most browsers, the backspace key does work when you can't see a back button (sorry, I keep forgetting not everyone is a computer geek).

And we now have a real preview...

Hey, it works!

Thanks, Kathy.