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?