The omnibus bill provides a boost, and full funding of Commercial Crew, for the first time ever. It also allows NASA to apply Soyuz payments for 2018 flights to the program, to get it flying in 2017 (I still think they could fly next year if they were serious about it). Loren Grush has more. Unfortunately, it also increases the SLS budget.

On the milspace side, it also lifts the restriction on the RD-180, which McCain is going nuts about on the floor right now, according to Twitter. He’s lambasting Shelby and Durbin by name.

[Update a while later]

The worst part of the NASA budget is that it overfunds SLS at the expense of (as usual) technology.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here‘s the McCain story. Nutty.