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Former Rep. Louis Stokes, the Man Who Saved the Space Station, Dies At Age 90
MarkWhittington writes: The Associated Press noted the passing of former Rep. Louis Stokes at the age of 90. Since Stokes was an African American Democrat first elected in 1968, most of the accolades touch on his effect on the civil rights struggle and his lifelong fight against racism. However, as George Abbey, former NASA Director of the Johnson Spaceflight Center and current Fellow in Space Policy at the Baker Institute of Rice University pointed out on his Facebook Page, Stokes can be rightly be said to be the man who saved the International Space Station and perhaps human space flight in America.
From TFA: "Stokes had voted to kill the space station in 1991 and 1992. However, thanks to lobbying by President Clinton, he switched sides and voted to continue funding the NASA project. Since the measure to kill the space station died by a single vote, Stokes, by switching sides, can rightly be said to have saved the project."
Oh, and for the 200-300 Hildabeast drones who are going to put up the usual REPUBLICANS HATE EVERYTHING copy-n-paste, please recall that in 1993 both houses of Congress were completely controlled by the Democrats who could do basically anything they wanted without having to worry about those evil evil Republicans getting in the way.
Please do correct me if I'm factually misinformed; but my impression is that 'saving the ISS' isn't exactly a noble cause when it comes to actually doing [i]science[/i] in and about space.
I'm personally very much in favor of NASA's role in aeronautics and space R&D(both the necessary delivery systems and the cool exploratory robots we have probing various bits of the solar system and the assorted satellites focused on earth-surface observation and astronomy work that the atmosphere would interfere with); but the ISS seems like the very worst flavor of man-in-a-can makework nonsense. It doesn't even have the cool-and-unprecedented factor of the sending-men-to-the-moon projects; but it consumes a lot of orbital lift capacity to send a rotating crew of humans; and the supplies to support them to a motly collection of hamster tubes in an orbit so low it barely counts as out of the atmosphere.
Is there any serious defense of the ISS in terms of a results per unit spend or unit lift capacity? It's neat, and it has podcasts, and such; but it had better be a lot of neat to justify all the possible 'send robotic probe to do something' or 'assemble larger telescope in orbit' or other projects that could have been done instead.
The Space Station (or "waste station", as we used to call it) helped kill the Superconducting Super Collider by taking away research dollars in 1992-1993.
Manned space flight is ridiculously expensive. The SSC, though greatly less glamorous, would have done a lot more for our understanding of the universe. So I don't see funding the ISS as an accomplishment.