“…and the lobbyists he road in on.”

An epic rant (IMHO) over at my underfunded Kickstarter project.

[Friday-morning update]

I’ll re-run the rant here:

I’ve been writing all week, in various venues, about the mess that we’ve gotten ourselves into with Russia, whose space systems seem to be having reliability issues, despite the successful landing today of the Soyuz (the same Soyuz that on Monday fired an uncommanded thruster for half a minute, resulting in an attitude and course change to the ISS that took a couple hours to get under control). For background, here is my latest post on that, with links to previous ones at Ricochet and (from last weekend) PJMedia.

As you’ll note, the House had previous cut about a quarter of a billion from Commercial Crew in its appropriations bill, about a 20% cut in NASA’s request. The Senate, under the “leadership” of CSJ Chairman Richard Shelby (DickShelbyParty – Alabama) (and full appropriations committee Chairman Thad Cochran, R-Mississippi, who also gets a lot of SLS jobs in his state) just passed out of committee an appropriations bill that ups (or downs?) the ante, cutting it by over a third of a billion dollars.

This, despite repeated warnings from NASA that such a cut would delay commercial crew beyond 2017 (Senator Nelson actually went on the floor yesterday and said by as much as four years, but that’s probably hyperbolic — SpaceX isn’t going to wait that long to get ready to support their commercial human spaceflight customers). Note that however long the delay is, it is of great benefit to Vladimir Putin, who will continue to defy INKSNA with impunity, continuing to provide aid to Iran in developing nuclear weapons and missiles, and continuing to enrich himself and his cronies from NASA payments to Roscosmos and other Russian space entities. I started a hashtag over on Twitter called #DickShelbyLovesPutin, and I think it’s entirely appropriate.

Why did they do this? Senator Shelby will blame sequestration, and that NASA just doesn’t have enough money to do all that they want to do, but as Jeff Foust’s article at Space News notes, they cut the Commercial Crew budget in the same bill in which NASA had an overall increase.

Folks, this is not about money.

It is about preserving and protecting the Senate Launch System, in two ways.

The first is that all of the money taken from Commercial Crew (and other money presumably taken from somewhere else) was used to up the SLS budget by hundreds of millions of dollars over the NASA request. As I noted in the video, this is crazy. No manager can sensibly spend a sudden increase of hundreds of billions of dollar dumped in her lap in a given year. The fact that they just come up with arbitrary numbers (e.g., the House simply slashed the budget to an even billion) indicates that zero thought or planning has gone into this.

But the other point is that, if Commercial Crew succeeds, it will simply be another nail in the coffin for one of the (insane) justifications for SLS — that it is an “insurance policy” should Commercial Crew “fail.” Yes, these people in Congress actually put forth the economically lunatic notion that a launch system that won’t fly with people until 2021 at the earliest, and will cost multiple billions per flight, is somehow a way to eliminate our need for the Russians.

Now you know that’s nuts. I know that’s nuts. But too many people don’t pay enough attention to understand why that’s nuts.

And this isn’t the first time this has happened. Every year, Shelby comes up with another scheme to hobble Commercial Crew because he knows that it’s a threat to his pork. Last year, the failed scheme was to cripple SpaceX with unnecessary accounting rules. He hates Commercial Crew, but he’d tolerate it if he could be assured it would go to Boeing, which is why, in his socialistic way, he continues to insist that the taxpayer would somehow be better off with no competition. What he really hates is SpaceX.

But now it’s gone beyond simply wasting tax dollars for pork in Huntsville (and Michoud, and Promontory, and…). It’s to the point that this is keeping us dependent on the Russians, into the indefinite future. Simply put, Dick Shelby doesn’t give a damn about that. He is Vlad’s BFF.

Beyond that, he doesn’t give a damn about our future in space. He doesn’t give a damn about taxpayer dollars, as long as they can be deployed to get him re-elected.

He has nothing resembling political principles, other than the importance of Dick Shelby keeping his Senate seat.

He’s not a Democrat. He’s not a Republican. He’s the one and only member of the Dick Shelby Party (emphasis on the first word). But sadly, because he caucuses with them, and he’s got seniority, too many Republicans go along with this treachery against the nation and against our future in space. And yes, that’s the word I use. It is, in the words of a Continental Army officer some time back, “Treason, treason, black as hell.”

And he gets away with it. This whole thing is happening because too many people think that SLS is necessary, and resist cutting it for that reason, even though it is absorbing all the money needed to develop things actually needed to move America into space. Ending that perception is not a sufficient condition to put an end to this madness, but it is a very necessary one

The purpose of this project is to show that this perception is simply untrue. Senator Shelby just gave you more reasons to support it. If you can afford more, please up your donation. If you can spread the word, please do so. Don’t let him get away with this.

[/rant]

If you were wondering how worthless/evil they are, they just praised the Senate mark up of the NASA budget.

Disgusting.

This is one of the reasons I’m on the warpath against the phrase “space exploration.” It’s so vague and meaningless that it can justify all manner of awful ideas.

[Update a while later]

The whole hog: Stephen Smith’s report on the NASA budget mess.

It’s been an exciting week on the International Space Station. On Monday, it had to dodge an old upper stage that was in danger of colliding with it. Then, yesterday, a reaction-control thruster unexpectedly fired for half a minute, causing a sudden unplanned shift in the facility’s attitude. Fortunately, the system reacted well overall, and things were restored to normal within a couple hours.

The misfiring thruster was on the Russian Soyuz capsule currently attached to the ISS. This is the vehicle in which it is planned to bring three crew members back to earth later tomorrow morning.

This is just the latest problem with Russian space hardware. The reason that the crew are coming home this month, instead of the originally planned return in May, is that there was a failure of a (Russian) Progress cargo ship at the end of April. As I wrote at PJMedia this past weekend: Continue reading Congress Continues To Fiddle With Monster Rockets, While Human Spaceflight Burns →