NASA's Future Space Mission Senate Hearings
01/28/04 00:00:00
By Michael Mealling
The Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation held a hearing this morning on National Aeronautics and Space AdministrationÂ’s (NASA) Future Space Mission. The witnesses and their testimony were:
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Dr. Louis Friedman Executive Director, The Planetary Society: testimony
The Honorable Neal Lane, Ph. D.: testimony
Dr. Howard McCurdy: testimony
Mr. Richard Tumlinson President, Space Frontier Foundation: testimony (this includes some interesting policy shifts for Richard)
Overall there's nothing really new here. Even Rick's testimony was largely a cut and paste from his previous commiteee appearance. He is dropping his idea of the Space Station Authority (but his alternative still sounds like the same thing). As was expected, Dr. Friedman kept to his “its all about science, right?” meme that I find emmensely uninspiring. He was the representative for the “Mars! Ra! Ra! Sis boom ba!” community. Dr. Lane pretty much said the same thing except that he focused on orbiting observatories. Dr. McMurdy went into NASA's management issues and was somewhat interesting, but not new.
The most interesting was O'Keefe's remarks since it had some tantalizing details. In his introduction he does include this:
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· Promote international and commercial participation in exploration to further U.S. scientific, security, and economic interests.
as one of four 'planks' that support the overall goal. The most interesting paragraph was this one:
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As we begin the process of retiring the Space Shuttle from service, NASA will separate to the maximum practical extent crew and cargo transportation for both ISS and exploration missions. NASA will acquire ISS crew transport as required and cargo transportation as soon as practical and affordable. NASA envisions that commercial and/or foreign capabilities will provide these services. The CEV may supplement these ISS capabilities, but its design will be driven by exploration requirements.
The way I read that is that we will use Russia for as long as we have to. The first instant there is a usable American alternative we will use that. And that includes CEV capabilities if no one else can provide the service by the time we'd like to be using it. Which to my mind means that our launch startups have a limited window in which to produce an alternative launcher. I suspect this jives with Elon's more aggresive time frames for his heavy launch capability.
Nothing much beyond that though…. If I find a transcript (the questions are often far more interesting) I'll post it here.
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