So, I was flying from Dallas to Denver this morning, reading the WSJ, and looking over the new committee assignments, and I noticed that Rep. James Oberstar (he who would have us overregulate the fledgling space passenger business, perhaps fatally) will be taking over the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. I wondered if he was planning to take another run at that, now that he's in the majority, instead of minority.

Now that I have Internet access again, I see that Jeff Foust already indicates that he just might have such plans.

If it happens, the main effect, I think, will be to chase people overseas, perhaps to Australia. We'll still get there, but it won't happen in the US.

The other issues that aren't mentioned in Jeff's post are the fate of Centennial Challenges and COTS under a Democrat Congress. I can see them preserving VSE/ESAS because of the jobs in Houston et al, but it's not obvious that prizes and commercial activities will continue to be supported by the Dems. They were by the Republicans due to White House pressure (at least in the case of COTS), but the White House won't have as much influence (to put it mildly) over the new budgetary sheriff in town, barring veto threats.

To a good 1st-order approximation, the constituency for government space activities is white males who can do math. These three characteristics are pretty much absent in any constituency with any significant affirmative influence in the current Democratic Party. The best it appears possible to hope for is two years of benign neglect of space-related matters. Given the ascendance of nanny-staters like Oberstar, I suspect we'll get much worse than that. Better start prying up cobblestones, gentlemen. The barricades aren't going to build themselves.

I read an article last weekend about how much New Mexico (significant non-white population and a Democrat governor, IIRC) is betting on space tourism to help boost their economy. Anything like over regulation that threatens that won't be greeted with open arms there.

> it's not obvious that prizes and commercial activities will continue
> to be supported by the Dems.

Lori Garver was one of the earliest and strongest advocates of prizes at NASA. The only Presidential candidate to talk about prizes in 2004 was John Kerry. The Republicans in the Senate are trying to kill Centennial Challenges. I don't know if the Democrats will be any better than the Republicans on prizes, but they can't be much worse, either.

The good news is that the so-called compassionate conservatives" (big-spending liberal Republicans) are pretty much finished. They've wrecked the Republican party. The "evil libertarians" and "fiscal conservatives" will rebuild it, and many of them are strong supporters of prizes and other free-market incentives.

(Of course, this train wreck won't stop the Bush Libs from telling us their big-spending socialist space program is the only one based "political reality." :-)

Oberstar is one man. He can't pass legislation from whole cloth by himself.

The Act that eased regulation on start-ups(the one Oberstar opposed had broad bi-partisan support).

At worst, he will delay mor efavorable legislation. He will not be able to water down what has already been done.