Michael Gallagher wrote:

On Fri, 17 Feb 2017 07:07:05 -0800 (PST), bob haller
wrote:

.... [Trump] wants to restart the draft and put ground troops in syria. plus the wall.

there will be no money left for space exploration


It is hard to discern Trump's intentions; he's the king of mixed
signals. On the one hand there is this report from space news:

http://spacenews.com/the-big-changes...oming-to-nasa/


Which has no idea of what Trump might propose.


But on the other hand there's this report from the New York Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/26/u...T.nav=top-news


Which has no idea what Trump might propose.


Add to this mix this action from Congress:

http://spacenews.com/house-ready-to-...pending-bills/


Which is probably closer to what will actually happen, although it
includes funding for the Earth Sciences stuff, which Trump wants to
move elsewhere and reduce funding for.


And it appears that commercial space backers have warmed to SLS a
smidge:

http://spacenews.com/commercial-grou...launch-system/


Largely a political position with some support for missions that
commercial space can't currently do.

So right now, what there is is a bunch of people speculating,
essentially in a vacuum.


My impression is that both Congress and many players in the space
industry don't want a repeat of the upheaval touched off by the FY
2011 budget. Reports also seem to indicate that if the Trump
administration favors shaking things up, it appears to be in favor of
SLS/Orion, not against it. This is not implausible because Trump's
AG, Jeff Sessions, was the senator from Alabama, and so has the
Marshall Spaceflight Center in mind.

But I'm the first to admit this is all speculation based on scant
evidence. We won't know for certain until Trump releases his budget
and names his NASA administrator. The lead for that is a House member
who's run a space museum and so is knowledgeable, but knowing Trump he
could tap a member of the Flat Earth Society who contributed a lot of
money. At the moment, this is my best guess.


I doubt there will be any significant change in the funding line for
SLS or Orion this year. It takes a (far too) long time to kill things
like this. Unless some reasonable missions for this system can be put
forward, I'd expect it to be killed over the next year or two.
Congressional action on requiring a report that Constellation can (or
cannot) be used to support ISS without the SLS booster indicates a
likely direction.

Personally, I'd like to see NASA put out specifications for what they
want and let commercial space folks bid on it. Taking SLS development
and operations money and diverting it to SpaceX, Blue Origin, etc,
would probably be a more efficient approach but NASA is unlikely to
want to let go of that much control.


--
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable
man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore,
all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
--George Bernard Shaw