Partisan Food Fight Erupts Over NASA, Commercial Space

RocketAcademy writes "Until recently, space policy has been a non-partisan issue. Even when politicians disagreed on space-policy issues, that disagreement rarely aligned with party lines. That has changed in the last few years. Now, one organization is throwing fuel on the political fire. The Space Frontier Foundation has called Republicans the Party of Big Government Space. SFF is upset about the GOP platform, which lacks specifics about space policy. According to the SFF, the GOP 'has nothing but hackneyed praise for NASA, and doesn't even mention the increasing role of the private sector.' The Obama campaign quickly echoed the statement. But NASA Watch points out that the Democratic platform is even less specific than the GOP's. Others express concerns that partisanship harms space policy."

Comments

Partisanship hurts everything.

[noobermin]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/07/13/13-reasons-why-this-is-the-worst-congress-ever/

You don't need to read it all, the first reason says it all. The entire point of congressional sessions is ot discuss and the whole point of discussion is to change minds. There is none of that from this congress and thus, they don't do their jobs but they get paid anyway.

Re:Partisanship hurts everything.

[ancientt]

(This has led to the odd sight of Republicans bringing Obama's budgets to the floor so they can say Democrats voted against them.)

Personally I think there is much the state governments should handle instead of the federal government, so I'm basically in favor of cutting the role of the federal government where reasonable responsiblities can be returned to the state. That's a lot of weasel words to say that state government spending is better than federal government spending, but not all the time.

So I'd rather see a congress locked into limited action rather than the rather abymissal results of a united one. There are exceptions where I think the federal government has a role, but over most of my lifetime, I've been continously disappointed in the "progress" when they do something "productive."

Summary: Please, please give me a "No" party to vote for. The republicans and democrats have both had plenty of examples where they voted for spending and increasing regulation when I strongly wish they had left that to the states, so I'm afraid I can't be happy to vote for either "retardicans" or "demotards" and carefully weigh each vote I make to try to figure out whether voting for somebody without a chance or voting against the slightly less terrible choice has the most impact. I can't remember the last time I was happy to vote for somebody that I thought might win.

It does strike me as slightly hilarious that you can get a situation where Democrats will vote against a Democrat budget and still call the opposition the "party of 'No'."

What is private?

[tomhath]

If NASA is funding development then it's not private.

If private companies want to develop their own space vehicles and offer their service for hire that's fine, but it's in addition to what NASA does (that's the Republican platform). Democrat platform seems to depend on what state the day's speech is delivered in.

Not a fight over food?

[Vylen]

Seriously, the headline had me thinking it was about a fight over food supplies in space with issues regarding commercial vendors to supply NASA or something.

Greatly disappointed :(

16 Trillion reasons

[nevermindme]

16 Trillion reasons not to spend more than keeping life support on for NASA. When there are less than 50% of US citizens are dependent on some type of federal aid to keep above bankruptcy it might be time to go to the moon. And when college students can afford to pay tuition from the earnings of part time job and not finance the basic education until there retirement perhaps mars would be in reach of American Astronauts. We will need to go backwards for a bit to rebuild ourselves.

Re:Who is behind the Space Frontier Foundation ?

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

How come we never heard from the so-called "Space Frontier Foundation" when Obama wanted to turn NASA into a zoo ?

Because he didn't. The idea of using NASA as form of interntaional outreach has been there for decades - NASA is a "halo" program for th US and is thus one of our best forms of PR. Reagan even made a speech where he said:

"We can find there's yet undiscovered avenues where American and Soviet citizens can cooperate fruitfully for the benefit of mankind. In science and technology we can launch new joint space ventures."

And BTW, that shit worked too. NASA's outreach programs have paid handsome dividends for America. We would never have had the Ansari X-Prize if Anousheh Ansari hadn't been inspired by NASA as a child in Iran.