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Election 2016

Clinton Talks Space in New Hampshire

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
July 16, 2015
Filed under
Clinton Talks Space in New Hampshire

Hillary Clinton sounds the alarm on meteorites, Politico
“When I was a little girl, I guess I was a teenager by then 14, I think, and the space program was getting started, and I wanted to be an astronaut, and I wrote to NASA,” she recounted. “And I said, ‘What do I have to do to be prepared to be an astronaut?’ And they wrote back and said, ‘Thank you very much, but we’re not taking girls,'” she remembered. “That, thankfully changed with Sally Ride and a lot of the other great women astronauts,” she said. But “to be fair,” she added, “I never could have qualified anyway, so you know, not something I spent a lot of time losing sleep over, but I really, really do support the space program.”

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

34 responses to “Clinton Talks Space in New Hampshire”

  1. ThomasLMatula says:
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    I wonder if Lori Garver will join her campaign again. The idea of planetary defense is good, but if the article is accurate she didn’t articulate it well.

    She didn’t seem to know mapping has gone on since the 1990’s by NASA. A couple of satellites would benefit the effort, but mitigation is an entirely different and more complex issue and not well suited to HSF as shown in Hollywood movies.

    The best move would probably be passing the Asteroid Act which is part of the SPACE Act, but the Democrats in Congress seem opposed to it if the committee votes mean anything.

    • Bernardo de la Paz says:
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      “passing the Asteroid Act which is part of the SPACE Act, but the Democrats in Congress seem opposed to it”

      That’s an intriguingly specific comment (or coupe of comments). For those of us unfamiliar with the details, would you elaborate, please?

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        The American Space Technology for Exploring Resource Opportunities In Deep Space (ASTEROIDS) Act proclaims that Americans own anything they can mine or extract in outer space. However it doesn’t provide any funding to actually do so.

        • ThomasLMatula says:
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          Daniel,

          Actually what the ASTEROIDS Act does is to clarify and codify that the same Chattel (personal property) Rights that governments enjoy in regard to materials recovered from Celestial Bodies also extends to private parties (Corporations and Individuals) in the United States for materials recovered from asteroids. It does not extend to the Moon, Mars or other large Celestial Bodies.

          It also provides an operational definition of the Article IX clause in the Outer Space Treaty in regards to private activities on asteroids and a procedure for resolving such issues among U.S. firms. The State Department would still have to address issues with the activities of foreign nations as provided for under the Outer Space Treaty.

          Yes, it doesn’t include funding but that is because it is not an Appropriations Bill, Instead it is a piece of legislation that provides a legal framework for private U.S. ventures to mine asteroids. It has nothing to do with NASA.

          But as part of their search for finding the most valuable asteroids private firms will likely do a far quicker job of surveying them than NASA will be able to do, just as a private venture mapped the human genome far faster than the government effort Ms. Clinton was referring to in her speech.

          In fact, Planetary Resources has just deployed it’s first satellite to search for asteroids, Arkyd 3, from the ISS. It was funded by Planetary Resources which owns it.

        • Bernardo de la Paz says:
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          So why is there opposition and who are the opponents?

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        Bernardo,

        Here is a link to a post about the fight over it.

        http://www.parabolicarc.com

        The ASTEROIDS Act was then incorporated in the Space Act of 2015 which passed the House, but is waiting on action in the Senate.

        http://nasawatch.com/archiv

        Here is a link to it on the website that tracks government legislation.

        https://www.govtrack.us/con

  2. Michael Spencer says:
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    This has nothing to do with space and everything to do with posturing for the votes of other women.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      Why would supporting space attract the votes of women?

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        She’s not supporting space, Dan, she’s supporting women’s efforts to become astronauts. It’s a ‘girl-power’ thing. Might as well be rock climbing.

        • Daniel Woodard says:
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          Ms. Clinton notes that she wrote to NASA in 1961, when she was 14. She’s quite correct that NASA refused to consider women at that time. She specifically notes several areas of space research she supports that don’t involve human spaceflight. I think it is quite clear that she does support space. As with Mr. Bush, she has not made clear exactly what policy changes, if any, she might implement.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        She is basically reminding women of the past (pre-1970’s) when men use to tell them they were not capable of doing many of the jobs they do today, a good strategy if you are seeking to be the first women President.

    • PsiSquared says:
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      On what is that conclusion based?

  3. Cincy says:
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    This “I wanted to be an astronaut” story sounds a lot like the “I wanted to be a Marine” story:

    She told the group gathered for lunch in the Dirksen Office Building, according to The Associated Press, that she became interested in the military in 1975, the year she married Bill Clinton and the year she was teaching at the University of Arkansas law school in Fayetteville.

    She was 27 then, she said, and the Marine recruiter was about 21. She was interested in joining either the active forces or the reserves, she recalled, but was swiftly rebuffed by the recruiter, who took a dim view of her age and her thick glasses. ‘Not Very Encouraging’

    “You’re too old, you can’t see and you’re a woman,” Mrs. Clinton said she was told, adding that the recruiter dismissed her by suggesting she try the Army. “Maybe the dogs would take you,” she recalled the recruiter saying.

    http://www.nytimes.com/1994

  4. Robert Rice says:
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    Oh yeah…for sure…NASA wrote back and said “we don’t take girls”

    What a load of external tank foam

    • John Adley says:
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      Being able to create alternative reality at anytime is a quality shared by politicians and schizophrenia patients.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      ‘external tank foam’!

      Actually NASA did reject women based on sex, a sad episode dramatized in the current TV series ‘Astronaut Wives’. There were a group of women fully trained and they were rejected because they had no test pilot experience. I don’t know about the congressional hearing portrayed in the TV show, though.

      Truthfully all the Mercury 7 needed was bravery. And a lot of it. Women have demonstrated no shortage of same.

      • Bernardo de la Paz says:
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        During the Mercury program NASA already had seven astronauts that were logically (whether necessarily or not) selected for being test pilots for what turned out to be a six mission program. So are you saying that they should have spent money on training extra astronauts just to satisfy some sort of gender quota requirement that never existed? Remember that even Jackie Cochran, hands down the premier woman pilot of the era, was opposed to adding women to the Mercury program for pretty much that reason.
        Which seems kind of irrelevant – Hillary Clinton finished her student career in 1973, which would have well aligned her for the 1978 class of astronauts in which the first female astronaut was accepted, except that by then she had chosen a career path and education entirely incompatible with being a professional astronaut. So, did she really write such a letter and receive such an answer as you guys are arguing about? I don’t know. But it is clear that had she really wanted to be an astronaut, she lived at a time in which that option would have become open to her.

  5. Neil.Verea says:
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    I wouldn’t put much weight on anything, regarding space, that any politician says during their campaigning. They’ll tell the audience what they want to hear.

    • Brian Thorn says:
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      Well, Senator Obama said he’d defer Constellation for five years to pay for his education initiative. More or less everyone understood that to mean he would kill Constellation.

      Once in office, that’s exactly what he did.

      So yes, we can sometimes take politicians at their word regarding space.

      • Neil.Verea says:
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        Actually a year after he said what you allude to, candidate

        Obama gave the first major space policy speech of his campaign in Titusville, Florida in August 2008.[5] He subsequently approved a seven-page space plan that committed to target dates for destinations beyond low Earth orbit:


        He
        endorses the goal of sending human missions to the Moon by 2020, as a
        precursor in an orderly progression to missions to more distant
        destinations, including Mars”.

        which is why you can’t believe anything they say. And by the way he didn’t delay CxP he canceled it and he didn’t use the money for education.

        • Yale S says:
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          Well, maybe candidate Obama wanted to do something that the catastrophic overwhelming Bush economic disaster soon made impossible,
          Remember, that speech was in AUGUST of 2008 and it was starting in SEPTEMBER that the utter financial collapse with resulting trillion dollar bailouts began in earnest.

          Here is the speech:
          https://www.youtube.com/wat

          He proposed extending the the shuttle by another flight (which he DID), and ramping up the shuttle successor. At the time he was assuming the Constellation Ares 1/ Orion was to be the taxi, and decided to keep it.
          Later, he became aware that the commercial taxis were possible and could do the job faster and cheaper.
          He actively requested their funding year after year, but the Republicans kept gutting his requests and the gap grew.
          Here are his requests versus Republican funding (CLICK TO EXPAND):
          http://spaceflightnow.com/w

          It is just that he is not a magician and his campaign proposals had to be set aside to deal with the horrifying nightmare he inherited from Bush Jr.
          When he took office in 2009, the country was in a absolute credit freeze and total financial panic.
          Money to build a US space taxi system and keep ISS flying, yes. Untold billions for a long-term future adventure, no, not at that moment.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            Congress has consistently appropriated substantially less for the commercial crew program than the Obama administration requested.

          • Yale S says:
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            Definitely. That is what that graph near the end of my post illustrates. We would be flying space taxis right now if the GOP had not blocked Obama’s requests.

          • Bernardo de la Paz says:
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            We would also be flying space taxis right now if Obama had not cancelled the phase 1 version of Orion.

          • Bernardo de la Paz says:
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            For the thousandth time, it’s not commercial if Congress pays for it. Period. Had the Obama administration not spread the money over four programs to do the same thing – CST-100, Dream Chaser, Dragon, and Orion (or five if you count Soyuz), larger appropriations would not have been necessary.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            Unfortunately the study that selected the Ares I concept contained significant errors, most seriously in underestimating the total cost of operation of an SRB-based system for human spaceflight.

  6. mfwright says:
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    From what I gather the response she got was from one person at NASA, and probably not representative answer of the agency as she would get something completely different from another person. Also back then it was a completely different world. An older lady said back in 1960s she interviewed for an administrative assistant (different than secretary) but interviewer said he cannot hire her because she is a woman. These days that is flat out illegal.

    Also in 1960s women cannot become astronauts because requirements were lots of experience in high performance jets. Meaning fighters which means flying such is a combat position that DoD strictly prohibited women in those positions. Later with Shuttle there was the Mission Specialist astronaut that didn’t require high performance jet experience.

    But that’s all history all of us on the space forums know which general public do not. Of course this little anecedote is good for campaign speeches though much out of context.

    My recommendation for any presidential candidate is to never discuss the space program as we’ve seen before it doesn’t go very well. i.e. Gingrich saying at end of his second term we will have a lunar base (Romney had a good time roasting him on that issue), and Obama saying he wants to cancel VSE and put that money to education (which caused FL democrats to shudder).

  7. Daniel Woodard says:
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    Years ago Ms. Clinton observed a Shuttle launch at KSC and spoke briefly in the Firing Room. She seemed genuinely impressed with NASA accomplishments in human spaceflight.

  8. PsiSquared says:
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    Clinton’s comments are no less credible than Gingrich’s comments about lunar colonies.

  9. Yale S says:
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    I think it depends on whether she is quoting or characterizing the purported letter. If quoting, then the letter is unlikely.
    If it is instead just characterizing the content which highlighted the inability for a women to have the qualifications such as supersonic jet fighter or test pilot, which women were locked out of, then it is certainly possible.

    • Daniel Woodard says:
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      At the time there were several women with excellent qualifications who were refused consideration on the basis of gender.

  10. Daniel Woodard says:
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    Senator McCain stated in no uncertain terms that the nation could not afford Constellation.

    • Bernardo de la Paz says:
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      Not being able to afford Constellation and not being able to afford to go to the moon are two different things.