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Election 2012

Houston Chronicle Endorsement: Based on Spite?

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
October 21, 2012
Filed under , ,

Romney for president, Houston Chronicle
“As Texans, it is a particular vexation that this president’s attitude toward the interests of our state has occasionally bordered on contempt, particularly in decisions relating to the NASA budget and the energy sector. The hurtful symbol of this attitude of insensitivity to Texans’ feelings was the administration’s choice to deny Space City’s bid to become home to one of the retired space shuttles.”
The Chronicle is wrong on NASA, opinion
“While the Romney campaign has largely been quiet on space policy except to criticize President Obama or mock Newt Gingrich’s lunar base proposals, what noise has been made from his camp is coming from the same former administrators and policy wonks who got us into this mess in the first place, like former NASA Administrator Mike Griffin.”

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

21 responses to “Houston Chronicle Endorsement: Based on Spite?”

  1. Joe says:
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    Even the notoriously liberal Orlando Sentinel now endorses Romney.  Is this spite too?  Their explanation and swallowing of pride is admirable and right on the money.

    http://www.orlandosentinel….

    • kcowing says:
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      Read the title of the post – I was not referring to the Orlando Sentinel.

    • Michael Reynolds says:
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      Uhh…the article you cited was an opinion piece. Hence it doesnt reflect the veiw or values of the agency publishing it. Alot of newspapers, both conservative and liberal, publish opinion pieces reflecting the opposite of their political affiliation. Usually to show their readers that they can be un-biased.

    • Ralphy999 says:
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      My son just got back from attending a convention in Orlando and he says the economy in Orlando is in the pits. It’s not suprising that the Sentinel endorses Romney. As if Romney will actually do anything for Orlando.

  2. blahblahblah34 says:
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    Call it spite if you want.  By cancelling Constellation, the Obama administration cast a cloud over JSC’s future.  JSC is a significant part of the Houston economy.  JSC is a huge component of Houston’s image as a city.  Given that, why wouldn’t Houston’s major newspaper endorse Obama’s opponent?

    • Todd Austin says:
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       I can answer that for you, b3_34. First, Romney’s only stated interest in space is its military uses, which is unlikely to by something handled by NASA. Second, Constellation was cancelled by Bush in all but name because he refused to demand enough money to actually make it work. By letting it limp along through his presidency, he gave the appearance of interest while pushing the blame off on to his successor for the results of his policy choices. Third, by pushing NASA to support commercial space and point the agency outward beyond LEO, he is giving JSC an actual hope of relevancy in the future, something that another four years of stumbling and bumbling with Constellation would not have done. Someone needs to tell the Chronicle and JSC that they can’t move forward by living in the past. The only people living in the past are in history books or coffins.

    • Brian_M2525 says:
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      The space program is a relatively minuscule part of the Houston economy. If, as Justin Kugler points out, the City of Houston and Space Center Houston had done a decent job on a bid for a Shuttle, then maybe the city would have had a chance and maybe it would have slightly improved the tourism scene, but unfortunately the poor job Space Center Houston did on the orbiter bid is pretty typical of the poor job they do routinely in celebrating spaceflight. That neither the city nor the NASA space center people insist on doing better just reflects the lack of leadership.

      As far as Constellation, as has been discussed for years, it was the wrong program, the wrong kind of program that strategically never made any sense, a really poor selection of hardware and poor design of hardware that was not going to do the required job; ridiculously expensive and unaffordable, and if you followed the program, it was further from flying by the end of the program than it had been at the beginning.

      The one thing that Kugler avoids in his critique, and that Obama and the NASA management failed at, was deciding four years ago up to grasp the situation with Constellation’s lack of progress and ISS’s predicament of a lack of support, and extend out the Shuttle program. They did not have to add additional flights, they just needed to space the flights out to no more than a couple per year in order to maintain the Shuttle capability until a new vehicle would be ready. 

      As Kugler points out, Griffin’s management shut down a lot of the space program in order to try and feed the unsustainable Constellation program. In the last year the US  has now succeeded at eliminating several additional substantial elements of the human space flight program. The first problem has now been compounded by several more. 

      Now the US is no longer a space-faring nation. Yes we have an ISS designed and built long ago (largely built elsewhere), and if there is a significant problem on-board, we no longer any way to maintain it. Sure it might make it to 2020 but it could just as easily have experience a failure that would render it useless in a matter of hours. And in the meantime we are losing the skill, experience and competence that went into designing, training and flying the missions, just as in the previous 15 years we lost the skill, experience and competence that was responsible for designing and building the complex spacecraft. 

      We are hoping that a small cadre like Space-X will return us to Gemini Program capabilities in a few years (a long way from Apollo or Shuttle). ISS is a great foothold and we need to keep it going as long as we can, but maintaining it in a status quo limbo is not the same, not demanding enough to develop or maintain the skills of the earlier generations.

    • TerryG says:
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      How about…
      1) The Obama era extension of the ISS program to 2020 is a lifeline to JSC operations & human space flight training thus saving JSC from being mothballed until the SLS makes crewed flights.
      2) The Chron editor’s endorsement isn’t pointing to anything positive or specific that the challenger might be offering NASA.
      3) The current administration ought to be thanked for cleaning up (rather than blamed for causing) the Constellation train-wreck.

  3. Brian_M2525 says:
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    I’m very happy that  Justin Kugler wrote the rebuttal to the Chronicle and that he wrote it from an honest position of knowledge. I am, however, concerned he is going to waste his vote on someone no one has ever heard of.

    • Citizen Ken says:
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       Voting for what you believe in is not wasting your vote.  I agree with Justin that Gary Johnson presents us with the most sane agenda for a presidency amongst the candidates. 

      Voting for the best path for our country, as opposed to the least worst path, is not a wasted vote.  Voting for least worst paths has gotten us to where we are now, and if the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results, then continuing to vote for least worst options is textbook insanity.  Some of us won’t be a party to that.

  4. newpapyrus says:
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    Obama was never going to win the State of Texas. But his hostility towards NASA’s manned space program could cost him the extremely  important swing state of Florida which he barely won in 2008. This was a huge political blunder, IMO, that could cost him the election!

    Maybe President Obama thought his hostility towards the  government’s manned space program and his support for private commercial space development might garner him some political support from anti-government  Republicans in addition to the liberal wing of the Democratic party which has tended to be cynical about the expense of a government manned space program. But his attempt to stop NASA from traveling anywhere was met with hostility from both Democrats and Republicans in Congress.

    Obama came into office with enemies on the right already entrenched and ready to try and take him down! So the last thing the President needed was to make– unnecessary enemies– by opposing the space legacy of John F. Kennedy. Obama could have easily continued to support NASA’s return to the Moon with a more economical architecture while also supporting commercial crew development. And he probably would have gotten strong bipartisan support from Congress. But he didn’t do that!

    I’ve already voted for Obama by mail-in ballot because I think Romnney’s: government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich philosophy would be an economic disaster for the US!  But, unfortunately, Obama’s infamous words to NASA on April 15, 2010 could undermine his reelection :

     “Now, I understand that some
    believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the Moon
    first, as previously planned. But I just have to say pretty bluntly
    here: We’ve been there before!”
    If Obama loses the State of Florida by just a few votes, causing him to lose the general election, then he  should remember how those cynical words above  might have hurt his reelection and possibly the future of this country! Marcel F. Williams

    • dogstar29 says:
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      Maybe you haven’t been in Florida lately.  SpaceX already has more people working here than SLS. Bush’s Constellation eliminated thousands of Florida jobs and sent them to Alabama and Texas. It’s Obama’s initiatives with SpaceX, Boeing, Sierra Nevada and ULA for Commercial Crew, and the prospect of frequent launches of ordinary tourists from Florida into space that are exciting people and creating jobs and a sustainable commercial space launch business, not the prospect of someday watching a handful of civil servants go to the moon at enormous taxpayer expense. Again.

      • Ralphy999 says:
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        If Romney gets elected you won’t have to worry about anybody going to the moon. Except for maybe the Chinese.

      • newpapyrus says:
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         Lunar water could make private commercial manned spaceflights to the Moon almost as easy as flying people into orbit.

        Allowing other nations like China, Russia, Japan, or Europe to lead the world in developing  and processing this precious lunar resource will not help the US economy, nor will it help private US commercial crew development. It will hurt it!

        The US is already largely dependent on foreign fuel for its terrestrial transportation system (this has not been good for the US economy). So also being dependent on foreign fuels in space for our beyond LEO efforts is the last thing our economy and the emerging commercial crew industry needs!

        Marcel F. Williams

      • KeCo says:
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        To be fair I don’t think any of the projects you mention are truly Obama initiatives. On the other hand, Obama has not been hostile to the manned space program. These private programs continue to get support, ISS has been extended, and there are at least plans for asteroid exploration in 2025 and orbiting Mars in the 2030s.

  5. Anonymous says:
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    By golly, short memory people have here. See Wayne Hale’s 2011 blog “Why Houston Did Not Get A Shuttle” http://waynehale.wordpress…. which he said, “When was the last time a sitting governor came to JSC? I know the answer: Ann Richards in 1995. When was the last time the Houston mayor bothered to visit JSC? Anybody remember?”

  6. bobhudson54 says:
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    More Romney bashing. I voted for Mitt,thank you.
     

  7. Ted Adderly says:
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    Rick Perry has held President Obama is total disdain and some Texas supported this. Now we wnat to cry about how Texas is treated. Get a grip!

  8. Charles Dickson says:
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    Did a bunch of Texans just complain about their “hurt feelings” in print?