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Senators Question Removal of NASA Program Manager

Hugh Pickens writes "The New York Times reports that one day after the removal of NASA's head of the Constellation Program, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, chairman of the committee that oversees NASA, and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, the committee's ranking Republican, have asked NASA's inspector general to look into whether the NASA leadership is undermining the agency's moon program and to 'examine whether this or other recent actions by NASA were intended or could reasonably have been expected to foreclose the ability of Congress to consider meaningful alternatives' to President Obama's proposed policy, which invests heavily in new space technologies and turns the launching of astronauts over to private companies. Congress has yet to agree to the president's proposed policy, and has inserted a clause into this year's budget legislation that prohibits NASA from canceling the Constellation program or starting alternatives without Congressional approval. The Constellation manager, Jeffrey M. Hanley, whose reassignment is being called a promotion, had been publicly supported by the NASA administrator and other NASA officials. But he may have incurred displeasure by publicly talking about how Constellation could be made to fit into the slimmed-down budgets that President Obama has proposed for NASA's human spaceflight endeavors."

2 of 67 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Congress needs to do more than complain by Herkum01 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Why fully fund it, when you can do a half-assed job instead? Come on, it is the American way!

  2. Re:Can you imagine... by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 4, Funny

    Then the Apollo program really would have been filmed in Hollywood studios.

    Hey, scratch that. I now have definitive proof that the Moon landings were not filmed in a studio. The films were shown on TV; free of charge.

    If Hollywood faked the Moon landings, they would have had DRM stuff on all of it. And if anyone said the word "Moon", the MPAA would have been all over it.

    --
    Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!