Commercial Space Proponents Respond

Note circulating in the Suborbital research community: “As you may know, Sen. Nelson’s NASA authorization markup kills the CRuSR line item. Yesterday Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico introduced an amendment that would bolster this small but high-profile program, designed to allow students, small companies, and researchers to fly experiments on-board new commercial suborbital space vehicles such as Virgin Galactic or XCOR Aerospace. The amendment would ensure that this program, known as Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research (CRuSR), would be fully funded at $15 million per year and report directly to NASA’s Chief Technology Office to give it high-profile status. Please call your Senators to support the Udall Amendment, call Sen. Nelson’s office to support it, and ask colleagues to do the same. The Senate NASA authorizing bill full committee vote is tomorrow (Thu 15 Jul)– please take time today on this important matter!”
Commercial Space in Jeopardy, Call Your Senator TODAY, Space Frontier Foundation
“I urge American citizens interested in the affordable utilization and eventual settlement of space to open their eyes to the attack on NASA’s new Commercial Crew Program by pork-hungry legislators. Contrary to the White House’s request, the NASA Authorization Bill proposes cutting commercial space by $2.1 billion (up to 66%). Virginia’s Senator Warner is ready to ride to the rescue with an amendment restoring full funding to the program, but he needs YOUR help to gain support from other Senators.”
Keith’s note: Its really somewhat counterproductive for the Space Frontier Foundation to put out a legislative alert and then insult every possible member of Congress that they seek to have people contact to help their cause i.e. calling them “donkeys” and “elephants”. Also, Instead of portraying this as a fight against pork (and indicting all of Congress in so doing) perhaps the proponents should be focusing on the virtues of commercialization instead.