Staffers for California’s Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein were no doubt nonplussed to discover that their bosses had been praised by the Tea Party on Monday. It’s all of a piece of the political bizarro world in which space policy has been immersed for the last year and a half, ever since the Obama administration canceled the disastrous Constellation program in favor of a more commercial approach, and the response of many supposed conservatives in Congress was to demand a “public option.”
So, how did the two senators earn the support of the Florida Tea Partiers?
As part of the final Continuing Resolution to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year, Congress, at the behest of space state Senators (Utah, Florida, Texas and Alabama), included an earmark of almost $2 billion dollars for a new heavy lift vehicle, which was supposed to use existing Shuttle and Constellation contracts and contractors. Specifically (among other features, or bugs, depending on one’s point of view), it was intended to use Shuttle solid rocket motors, manufactured in Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch’s Utah by ATK.
But a fly entered the senatorial ointment. Late last year, Aerojet General, the smallest of the big three propulsion companies, declared its intention to pursue the first-stage engine business, and threatened to sue NASA to force it to open the planned sole-source contract to ATK to competition.
Now enter the California senators. It is actually unusual for the California congressional delegation to pay much attention to space policy, despite the large amount of space industry in the state; traditionally, they have either taken it for granted, or ignored it entirely (for instance, there were few complaints back in the nineties when NASA moved a lot of Shuttle-related work from southern California to Texas and Florida). But Aerojet is based in Sacramento, the capital of the state, and apparently the company persuaded its senators, Boxer and Feinstein, to weigh in on its behalf. Late last month, they sent a letter to NASA administrator Charles Bolden, asking him to open up the propulsion contract to competition:
These words were music to the ears of both the Competitive Space Task Force (full disclosure: of which I am chairman) and Tea Party in Space, a Florida-based group that promotes a vigorous but fiscally responsible space program (something exactly the opposite of what those who make space policy on the Hill seem to want). Hence, Monday’s press release lauding the two senators’ action.
Interestingly and ironically, it sets up a potential battle in the upper chamber over space policy, in which the Democratic senators from California are fighting for a competitive approach (in the interest, of course, of their own home state contractor), against a “conservative” Republican senator from Utah who insists on a wasteful, sole-source pork-based one in the interest of his state.
Which all goes to show (as we’ve seen for the last year and a half) that space policy is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological, and it is driven primarily by rent seeking, not a desire to open up space to humanity. As long as space policy remains unimportant, it will continue to be subject to the petty politics of those whose states and districts benefit from the jobs created, even as wealth is destroyed. But the good news is that this may delay things sufficiently long that an expensive, unnecessary rocket never gets built at all.
