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Commercial Space Crew Supporters Posit a Conspiracy Theory Involving Funding Shortages
MarkWhittington writes: The Space Access Society, a group that advocates for government funded, commercially operated spacecraft, examined the annual fight between supporters of the heavy lift Space Launch System and supporters of the commercial crew program in a recent communique. In the view of the SAS and other commercial crew supporters, Congress, on the behalf of the big rocket supporters, has been shorting funding for the commercial crew spacecraft in favor of the SLS. On the surface there seems to be no reason for this, as the two undertake different missions. The Space Access Society posits a conspiracy theory so immense that at first glance would seem to be in the same class as the Apollo moonlanding hoax, The SAS accuses Space Launch System supporters of trying to arrange the premature end of the International Space Station to free up funding for the big rocket and related projects.
Its not a conspiracy, its fact. More than a few congress critters don't like ISS and would like to see it die. The whole touchy feely aspect of nations cooperating instead of constantly stabbing each other in the backs is probably point one. There are also more reasonable cost aspects, ISS has been extremely expensive, far more expensive than it had to be to accommodate so may disparate nations designs. Still others probably think SLS is some big, sexy spaceship that will take us to far more interesting places, ignoring the fact that it will probably only do so for a short time because of the massive costs and little if any returns. Only then do you get into the fraud/pork drives from congress members in districts that will see money & prestige from building parts for the "new rocket ship".
President Obama is the one who created this fight and has been using it politically.
In every single year since his 2010 NASA budget proposal advocated killing-off the bi-partisan Constellation program with no planned replacement, the President has fought a money game with congress over NASA. Each year he simultaneously claims he has too much money for the project congress wants to fund (SLS) and he tries all sorts of bureaucratic slight-of-hand to shift money from SLS/Orion to Commercial Crew. In each year he also slowly slips the SLS schedule and blames the slippage on Orion's service module (which he farmed-out to Europe because he said we could not afford to build it in the US) or slow progress on required infrastructure (which he also blames on funding). This REALLY angers a bunch of people in congress. When Obama has been offered the option of fully-funding both programs, which would bust a budget cap, he refuses to do this unless congress lets him bust the caps across the entire budget (something he knows will never happen).
Obama's supporters then use this fight to attack congress and some even claim congress is opposing him on this because he is black. This fight benefits him politically and he is the one who created it (by unilaterally cancelling Constellation and, after many months of congressional anger, producing a non-plan as his NASA plan) and he's the one driving the fight with a seemingly unending list of attempt to shift money congress mandated BY LAW for SLS into Commercial Crew without the legal authority to do it.