Why Won’t the Political Parties Talk About Space?

First of all, I need to preface this with (the fact that) we don?t endorse particular candidates. So when I talk about this, I?m talking about policy positions that we outlined and said, this would be great if somebody in government took this seriously. And then Obama?s proposals were very consistent with that.

What we loved that the Obama administration embraced was this idea that after decommissioning the shuttle, that we would give American industry and the American private sector the chance to perform the orbital launch services that we would otherwise (and are) contracting to the Russian space program. It doesn?t really make a lot of sense to outsource them to another country when American industry is 30 to 40 years old launching telecom satellites and launching the vast majority, if not all, of the military satellites and a lot of the NASA science satellites. There isn?t any reason not to allow them to launch our human cargo as well, the astronauts. He embraced that solution; he started moving us down that road.

As for why the party platform is not embracing that? I think we need to look again at the fact that the president didn?t write it. It was written by members of Congress, and they had a very different idea as to what the president should do, to the point of practically putting down technical statistics and specs into the appropriations bill to make sure that what we?re calling the Senate Launch System [the Space Launch System, or SLS] gets built rather that what we think to be a more rational way.

Clearly, they didn?t want to dwell on the differences they had with the president.

Source: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/nasa/why-wont-the-political-parties-talk-about-space-12636543?src=rss

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