Jeff Foust reports on the administrator’s testimony before the Senate:

“Do not confuse my desire for international collaboration for a willingness to rely on others for strategic capability,” he said in open remarks at a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee last week. Dependence on Soyuz “is not an option we would choose, but it is where we are today. In fact, we must seek an exception to the Iran Syria North Korea Nonproliferation Act because we have no immediate replacement for the shuttle and no other recourse if we wish to sustain the ISS.”

Given that statement, you would think that Griffin would be interested in accelerating domestic commercial options like COTS that would lessen or eliminate an reliance on the Russians. Yet, in his comments later in the hearing, he was not that interested in pursuing a crew option for COTS (also known as Capability D) on an accelerated schedule.

Yeah, you’d think. But I suspect that he fears that if COTS is seen to be making too-rapid progress, it will jeopardize funding for Ares/Orion, by making them seem superfluous. Of course, the traditional argument is that they are designed for the lunar mission, whereas a station crew transfer capability wouldn’t have that additional capability. And Orion is supposedly not just for going back to the moon but for use in a Mars mission as well (though it is never explained what its role is in such a mission). I can’t believe anyone seriously believes that a Mars mission would be performed in a glorified Apollo capsule–it’s simply too small, and the crew would go nuts. If it’s meant as the means to return them to earth upon return to earth orbit, well, OK, but it’s pretty pathetic to think that, seventy years after the first lunar landing, we would still be returning people to the planet in a capsule on a chute (particularly if they end up with a water landing).

Of course, the real danger is that we’ll get the worst of both worlds–a continuation of Ares/Orion, which are supposedly being built because they are necessary to go to the moon, but we drop the lunar mission from the policy, so they revert to simply replacing (or competing with) COTS crew capability. And unfortunately, as devoted Democrat Greg Zsidisin has discovered in a one on one, that seems to be exactly Obama’s plan. The only saving grace of it is that, in delaying the development by five years, it really means that the program will die. But it betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of space policy, and space hardware and development, on the part of Obama and/or his advisors. You can’t “delay” a program like this and have any hope that it won’t end up costing much more over the long run, particularly because you’ll lose many of the key personnel for it, who aren’t going to sit around twiddling their thumbs at no pay for half a decade while Obama solves the education problem. It’s really quite absurd. But then, most of his proposed policies are–one of the many reasons that he isn’t going to be elected.

As an aside, Jim Muncy said during the wrap-up panel last week in Phoenix that NASA has a bigger problem with the Iran Non-Proliferation Act than buying Soyuzes to replace Shuttle. Because the facilities are in the Russian segment, the ISS astronauts won’t even be able to use the potty if they don’t get a waiver, which could get pretty interesting on a six-month tour. The notion brought up the obvious jokes: “You’ll just have to hold it,” and “You should have gone before you launched…”

[Tuesday morning update]

Jon Goff has further thoughts:

…if you were a congressman or senator with a limited amount of money available, and you have two risky ventures to pick from to try and reduce the gap, what would you do? Would you place all your money on the one option where your money is going to be a relative drop in the bucket, and that even then has little or no chance of actually reducing the gap? Or would you invest at least part of your money in a much smaller program where it has a much higher probability of actually hastening the day when the US once again has manned spaceflight capabilities–and better yet, commercial manned spaceflight capabilities?

You do the math.

Unfortunately, the only math that interests most congresspeople is the number of jobs in their district or state, with “the Gap” a distant second place. Mike knows that, which is why he can get away with this stuff, or at least why he has to date.

Jeff Foust has a report on an interesting talk by Charles Miller that I missed yesterday.

Says that we have to engage SEDS, both because it’s a good source of enthusiastic people who will work cheap, and more importantly because we aren’t getting any younger, and we have to start nurturing young people.

He’s here from Washington, and he’s here to help.

Depressing to sit in meetings in Washington listening people talk about The Vision, and hearing the same things he heard about X-33, SEI, Space Station Freedom, etc. They don’t even seem to learn any new lies.

It is silly season in Washington. Working on the budget. It’s an election bill so they won’t even finish the budget before the election. Wants the election to be over, and has wanted it to be over for months.

Does it matter? Probably not. He and Lori Garver did a “debate” (really an assessment of the candidates at the time) a month and a half ago. Hillary is probably the most supportive of space spending. Fairly pro defense for a New York Democrat. Has in tepid words endorsed the idea of the vision. Also said positive words about private companies and working with them. Has not specifically endorsed Ares.

McCain’s experience with space has been primarily concerned with cost control and getting the job done right.

Obama is the most interesting, and unclear what he thinks. But there is potential for something different, because he says Shuttle is boring. Instincts are not to support current NASA approach. But worst thing would be to continue Ares I and Orion and delay lunar missions. Could create opportunities, or not. Crisis is coming, and crisis represents opportunities. NASA and Air Force are not monoliths.

“You should see the list of things that Orbital wants from Florida to get them to move ther e from Wallops.” There are figures inside the establishment calling for different approaches. Senator Nelson is writing a bill that increases COTS by several hundred million dollars to augment SpaceX and bring in an additional provider for crew transport. He recognizes that this is the only way to have a chance of closing “the Gap.” Senator Shuttle recognizes that he has to bring private space companies to Florida.

We’ve seen NASA put out an RFI for human suborbital science from the private sector. Things are changing. But don’t assume that NASA and the Air Force have come around in general. Also don’t assume that NASA or the Air Force are going to write you a check. Have to figure out what their real mission/requirements are.

We are the PC industry of space. It wasn’t just the people running the computer centers and mainframes thinking that PCs were choice. The challenge was getting the people who used computers then to think through what they did, and how they did it, and imagine doing it differently, and how they could use these new small computers. There are half a dozen people like Ken inside of NASA, but that’s not enough. We have to do their job (which is also our job) which is to figure out how to provide value to them
from their perspective. What he does for a living is help companies do that.

We have to figure out how we play a role in this future, and if an Obama becomes president, and we can’t continue to fund space on an ICBM budget, and we want to continue to send people into space, we will have to come up with new ways.

ESAS is not the same as the Vision. The Aldridge Report is right. It’s not perfect, but it’s largely right. It’s not a blueprint, which is why Griffin was upset with it, and wrote one of his own instead.

Work together, build alliances, come up with concepts to get to market sooner. As the dinosaurs die off, there will be some scraps for the mammals, and room to grow. We are coming to the attention of powerful people, which is a good thing. There are good times ahead, and people are figuring out that there is something wrong. The house of cards is going to fall. Can’t say well, but it’s going to fall.

Mike Griffin might be arrogant (and he has enough degrees to justify that) and he may be building the wrong rockets, but he has also been putting money into commercial activities while he builds das rocketz. We haven’t proven ourselves. Elon still hasn’t launched a payload to orbit. John Carmack still hasn’t won his two million dollars. Only Burt has an accomplishment to date. We can’t just be intellectually correct. We have to show the world that we can do it.