He doesn’t seem very confident in commercial space:

Do you have any hope for commercial space efforts, like Space X?

It has been the commercial space industry, under NASA’s leadership and guidance, that has allowed us to get to the moon and build a shuttle and everything that has happened in the last 50 years. To entirely turn it over without any oversight to the commercial sector, which is a word I question anyway, is going to take a long time. Some of these guys are highly qualified, but some are young entrepreneurs with a lot of money, and for them it’s kind of like a hobby. Not all of them. But some of them are making claims to get into space in five years for $10 billion, and even the Russians say it’s going to take twice as long if we put our eggs into that basket. I don’t have a lot of confidence in that end of the commercial space spectrum getting us back into orbit any time soon. I’d like to hear all these folks who call themselves commercial space tell me who their investors are. Tell me where their marketplace is. A commercial venture is supposed to use private money. And who are their users? Suppose we, NASA, have no need for their services. There’s no other marketplace for them. So is it really a commercial venture, or is it not? Is it a group of guys who have stars in their eyes and want to be a big space developer? I don’t know.

I don’t think they’ll come anywhere near accomplishing what they’ve said they can do. I said before Congress, and it’s still true today, they don’t yet know what they don’t know. We, if you’ll allow me to include myself with NASA, have been doing this for half a century. We have made mistakes. We’ve lost colleagues. Don’t you think we’ve learned from some of those mistakes? You bet your life we have. They have yet to learn from those mistakes. And I’m not willing as a taxpayer to sit here and pay them to make those mistakes before they can ever get where they think they can go. Now the good news side of this is there are some of the larger aerospace companies looking into getting into it, the Boeings, the Lockheed Martins, the ATKs, are now looking to compete in the commercial side of the business. That’s a little more encouraging. Those are the folks who have been working on everything we’ve done for the last 50 years. They know how it can be done.

Not encouraging at all. Would I still vote for Romney over Obama, knowing this? In a heartbeat. Putting out of office the corrupt and dangerously incompetent disaster currently in the White House would be worth the (manageable) risk of strangling the Obama space policy in the crib. Would we need to keep a sharp eye on a President Romney’s space policy to make sure Mike Griffin and others with Griffinian proclivities couldn’t pull the stake out of the heart of Constellation and resurrect his dream rocket at the expense of a non-NASA-dependent space industry? Absolutely. But when has there not been a need for space advocates to stand watch on space policy?

UPDATE: Interesting that Robert Crippen, another Romney space advisor, served as president of Thiokol Propulsion. 

Scott Pace [PDF] was head of program evaluations at NASA during the Griffin years, and at least as of last August Pace was promoting a return to the Ares I/Ares V architecture (as a better alternative to the SLS, believe it or not):

“Ironically, the budget pressures being put on the program right now would in my mind argue for returning to the previous plan,” Pace said, “which was launch and build Ares I first and build Ares V later.”

Ares I was the first and smaller of tworockets in the now-canceled Constellation program, which also included a Multipurpose Crew Vehicle (MPCV) that is being constructed. Ares I, which could have taken astronauts back to the moon, was being developed in Huntsville by many of the aerospace workers now facing layoffs.

For Pace, Ares has several positives. First, a lot of money and time have already been spent on it, and that work would feed into the larger rocket later.

“You build on the work that was already done,” Pace said of Ares I. “You can fly the MPCV. You have five-segment solid (rocket motors) that are already done. You have a use then on the upper stage for the J-2X engine, which is also in development.”

To encourage commercial cargo runs, NASA has hired SpaceX and a second company, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp. to fly cargo to the space station, a $100 billion project of 16 countries, which orbits about 240 miles above Earth.

A successful test flight by SpaceX — as well as a similar run by Orbital scheduled for next year — would begin restoring U.S. access to the station, which is expected to remain operational until at least 2020.

As others have pointed out, space policy is the one area where the Obama administration seems to be getting things more or less right – and that’s all the more amazing for it involving commercial endeavors. (It’s early, of course – if and when these commercial startups hit their stride, that will be when the federal government starts taxing and regulating them out of business like every other successful industry.)

Note the matte black paint around the windows, a detail we didn’t see on GTA. The panel in view is from sector F, so the hidden panel on the other side would be its (essentially) mirror-image A, making this the weld at the 12:00 position (between the windows). [Correction: no, the welded-to piece is a cone longeron, not the sector-A panel. Derp.] The further away of the two windows is canted inboard to provide forward views for rendezvous and docking.

One curious but annoying (yet common) omission here is any mention that the work isn’t being performed by NASA but by Lockheed Martin. Unless you knew, you would be given the impression by the language here that it was otherwise – “Engineers at NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility” being factually correct but completely misleading. We saw the same thing after Katrina, when NASA issued a press release thanking the rideout crew who saved MAF from flooding, never mentioning LM (the facility operator at the time and employer of most of the crew) and carefully phrasing things to imply – without stating it explicitly – that they were all NASA civil servants.

Why do they do that? Strange.

I wish it had occurred to me to do so six years ago. The lower-level issues and decisions I’ve been involved in would alone make for some very interesting case studies.

NASA’s Messenger spacecraft snapped the new Mercury photo today (March 29) at 5:20 a.m. EDT (0920 GMT). The photo shows the stark gray landscape of southern Mercury, a view that is dominated by a huge impact crater. [See the first photo of Mercury from orbit]

“This image is the first ever obtained from a spacecraft in orbit about the solar system’s innermost planet,” Messenger mission scientists explained in a statement.

The new Mercury photo shows a region around the south pole of Mercury. A 53-mile (85-kilometer) wide crater called Debussy clearly stands out in the upper right of the image, with bright rays emanating from its center. [More photos of Mercury from Messenger]

A smaller crater called Matabei, which is 15 miles (24 km) wide and is known for its “unusual dark rays,” is also visible in the image to the west of the Debussy crater, mission managers explained.

If the NASA Space Shuttle is able to reenter from the orbit of the Earth then the NASA Space Shuttle is able to reenter because of the heat of 1,500 °C.
The NASA Space Shuttle isn’t able to reenter because of the heat of 1,500 °C.
Hence, the NASA Space Shuttle isn’t able to reenter the orbit of the Earth.

If the NASA Space Shuttle is able to reenter from the orbit of Earth then the NASA Space Shuttle is in orbit.
The NASA Space Shuttle isn’t in orbit.
Therefore, the NASA Space Shuttle isn’t able to reenter from the orbit of Earth.

They “syllogism” format sure looks familiar from Loughner’s known rantings.

It also reminded me of the old Robert Lavelle “Space Ends and Moves” spam emails from several years ago, which those who worked in the aerospace industry or at NASA at the time may recall.

Not sure if this means anything, but given Loughner’s apparent personal obsession with Giffords and the fact that her husband is a Shuttle commander, there could be something there motivating his ranting about NASA.

[hat tip: el Presidente]

There were probably more reasons for the cancellation than were publicly admitted to than just the engine difficulties. But if that’s all there was, it’s interesting to note (as others have) that SpaceX’s original Merlin-1 engine is in the same thrust class as Fastrac. And Merlin-1 has actually flown.

Plus, it doesn’t hurt that the Obama administration’s space policy tends to the commercial. Or that Obama and Musk seem to be pals.

I actually don’t expect X-34 to fly (if they haven’t been stored properly for the past ten years, the refurbishment costs will probably be uneconomical). But I sure would like to be pleasantly surprised.

And since I don’t have time for anything original today, I’ll link to a post from 2006 wherein I revisit the 1976 Bicentennial exhibitions at Kennedy Space Center…which I actually visited for real just a couple days before the Bicentennial day proper.

I just hope they don’t wait too long for a commercial provider to emerge. There’s scuttlebutt going around that they are working with multiple contenders to assure that they aren’t left without some means of getting to their station(s).