Fool on the Hill

Political gambits have Bush singing February blues

The clearest example was the plan to send men to Mars. This wasn’t a real policy proposal.

The whole thing was never even meant to happen. It was supposed to be a campaign sound bite to give a running start to the State of the Union roll-out and a bullet point for the president’s onward-and-upward-with-optimism reelection theme.

See, apparently he doesn’t get the point that I’ve been harping on here for the past three weeks: retirement of the Orbiter fleet is the one thing in this whole policy that Bush can assure before the end of a putative second term, and the one element of his plan that he seemed the most certain of during his speech on January 14.

The phrase I’ve been looking for all this time is “precipitating a crisis”. The one thing that sets the Bush policy apart from that of his father or any number of other “NASA visions” of the past is that this one sets in motion a chain of events which will force the agency to change instead of continuing on with the untenable status quo. It’s such a subtle point that most pundits outside of space circles seem to have overlooked it in their breathless rush to criticize the Bush policy’s much more obvious and fundamental flaw: the fact that it was proposed by President Bush.

Had this been a serious proposal, it would have required a vast national effort costing, in all likelihood, hundreds of billions of dollars.

No. Not yet, anyway, and there’s no real reason it must do so. Like so many others, Marshall here is basing his opinion on little more than received wisdom: the Bush 41 Moon/Mars proposal (a.k.a. “the 90-Day Report”) came with a sticker price of $400B+, therefore, all Moon or Mars proposals must cost that much or more. But none of the pundits repeating that claim appear to be aware of the politics behind the $400B figure — namely, NASA threw in all sorts of nice-to-haves and gee-whiz science-fair elements, either due to the expectation of Apollo-style blank check funding or the desire to kill the initiative in favor of Space Station by making it so expensive as to be DOA in Congress (it depends on whose interpretation you read).

Yet when it didn’t strike a chord with voters or the Sunday shows, it got tossed aside without a second thought.

Funny — NASA appears to be taking the new policy seriously, or is at least doing more than sitting some Deputy Assistant Vice-Undersecretary in a broom closet with few blank viewgraph sheets and a box of Crayolas: NASA Announces New Headquarters Management Alignment:
In a move designed to align the agency with the new exploration agenda outlined yesterday by President George W. Bush, NASA Deputy Administrator Frederick D. Gregory announced a comprehensive restructuring of the offices within Headquarters in Washington.

NASA Begins New Exploration Journey With FY 2005 Budget
To achieve these goals, NASA will plan and implement an integrated, long-term robotic and human exploration program structured with measurable milestones. NASA will execute the plan using the best available resources, accumulated experience and technology.

Yahoo! News – President Names Eight Moon Advisers

Sounds to me like Josh Marshall doesn’t really know much about space policy. But hey, why let that stand in the way of taking a rhetorical poke at the President?

The way the personal animosity towards Bush is driving the opposition to and ridicule of this new policy, I have to wonder how long it will be before the anti-Bush crowd starts calling him “President Space Cadet” and (as someone at Transterrestrial Musings suggested) demanding the immediate end to the space program simply to spite the “Smirking Chimp”.