Story so far: (correct me if I'm wrong)

NASA has plan to get into the Moon by 2028.

Pence blindsights NASA and contractors by moving timeline arbitrarily forward without a plan in a grandstanding speech. "At the direction of the President of the United States, it is the stated policy of this administration and the United States of America to return American astronauts to the moon within the next five years”. It's not a Tweet so NASA must scramble to make a plan. Funding for a new timetable is not there.

Gerstenmaier is removed without explanation as a head of HEO almost immediately after he testifies to congress. Gerstenmaier quits NASA to consult SpaceX.

Loverro comes in, is very bullish about the timetable. Now Loverro quits suddenly.

I think it's time for Jared to come in. If he can handle Middle-East peace and Covid-19, why not a Moon landing as well.

> I think it's time for Jared to come in. If he can handle Middle-East peace and Covid-19, why not a Moon landing as well.

You’re being sarcastic but this is horrifying.

In the country my parents immigrated from, government officials appointing their family members to important positions is very normal.

It also did get bad enough that my parents had to leave that country behind.

You'll be delighted to know that there's an increasing number of people leaving the US behind as well, or at least making substantial plans on what to do if they need to leave in a hurry.

Official numbers from 2019: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245789/record-numbers-americans...

Anecdata suggest this has significantly increased in the last year, and especially in 2020.

We live in what amounts to a failed state. There's still some hope it's repairable, but it's rapidly dwindling, and Jared's crown prince role is a large contributor to that dwindling.

Given the state of things, I'm not very hopeful. There are 10's of millions of people who don't believe in science (except when it saves their lives at the hospital), don't believe anyone but their dear leader (all news that contradicts their leader is "fake news") and hate anything that sounds intellectual (remember John Kerry? That was the main knock on him) because it makes them feel smarter.

And now, with the current administration removing watchdogs and ramping up corruption, it will be a miracle if any opposition with a majority of votes can actually win. Look at the attack on vote by mail, as an example.

Roger Ailes is dead, but his legacy lives on.

Something I find fascinating in this discussion is how November affects things. If Trump is re-elected, any hope of repairing institutions is realistically lost. If he isn’t, there’s a real possibility of funny business, either contesting the result or refusing to leave office.

I know it sounds preposterous that a president would refuse to leave office, but it also seems preposterous that an impeached president wouldn’t step down, and he’s become accustomed to degrading norms and breaking the law with impunity.

US lifestyle is still very good, but for those of us looking at the trend it’s really concerning. I know I’m personally making decisions with the possibility of needing to leave in the future.

>>> but it also seems preposterous that an impeached president wouldn’t step down

Like Clinton? Like Andrew Johnson? No impeached US president has ever stepped down. Nixon resigned before he was impeached.

I'm thinking about how Trump is running for re-election after impeachment - afaict that's somewhat novel. Nixon as you mentioned resigned under threat of impeachment.

I think maybe the bar for conviction in the Senate is too high in a way that is corrosive to presidential accountability. Both Trump and Clinton committed serious crimes without real consequence and it is disgraceful, regardless of politics. (note: I don't care about the sex, I care about the perjury and obstruction of justice)

You might not be able to go anywhere if US screws its COVID-19 response and the entire rest of the world does not.

There was at least part of NASA, including the Administrator that welcomed the 2024 target.

It's hard to imagine counterfactual where NASA administrators says something else and wants to keep his job. It's like how fighter pilots are always saying good things about new plane they are flying. It's the only option.

Government contractors were genuinely ecstatic. There is no downside for them.

> I think it's time for Jared to come in. If he can handle Middle-East peace and Covid-19, why not a Moon landing as well.

People say he's unqualified for anything. But he is uniquely qualified in that he is immune to being fired for fucking up everything.

Jared has only two positions:

1. Senior Advisor to the President

2. Director of the Office of American Innovation within the White House Office (position created specially for him). The office exists only to make recommendations the President.

When he meddles with the CDC or the US foreign policy, he is not bearing any legal responsibility. He is grey eminence operating in unofficial capacity. He can't legally make anyone to do anything, but everyone knows that he is just phone call away from the real power.

Amazingly I actually remember the Logan Act from US History, and even thought of it before I heard it mentioned in the news.

Logan Act applies to Flynn when he was working as transition team member for Trump when Obama was president. It applies to Jared when he was transition team member and talked to Saudis and Israel. President-elect is not the president.

Logan act does not apply to Kushner when he is acting on behalf of the president as he is doing today. Kushner has authorization to do what he does. He even has senior position in the WH. What he does not have is executive power or position on his own.

Jared's talent (if he has any) is to screw up and then convincingly claim he did a great job. Trump sees this as the apex of ability.

And so do his supporters. It makes an extremely effective political combination: all the enthusiasm of winning without actually doing anything. And it works as long as you can have goodwill and assets to burn.

Except when something happens that defies spin, like a pandemic that takes away jobs and lives.

I'm not sure how this is going to turn out, but even if the US elects a different president, the current one has provided a nice handbook to a potential autocratic future president to gain unlimited power.

I suspect that even a pandemic may not suffice. The only thing that gets through is a direct personal loss, and the death rate seems too low for that. You'd need deaths in the millions for everyone to know someone who died.

Even then it's easy to blame it on someone else. There's a reason they are calling it the Wuhan Virus.

I think the bissgest issue the Trump administration has with space is they don't have any idea how the Kennedy and Johnson administrations dealt with it. They think that Kennedy just decided one day that we would send men to the moon by the end of the 60's, but in reality it was years of discussions with NASA, largely championed by Johnson, before Johnson recommended to Kennedy that they establish this policy to put the US ahead of the Soviet Union.

Instead of this, we have the usual situation modern space exploration has settled into, some president boasts that we will do some thing and then after they left office some other president quietly kills it because its way to expensive.

What we should be doing is building coalitions with other countries to do join missions to the moon and all that, thats why the ISS has been so successful, its not just the US or Russia contributing, but dozens of countries. Not to say it could happen without the US or Russia, but the large number of countries working on it helps quite a bit.

Having read some of the histories of NASA and spaceflight, I think you're dramatically mistaken.

Kennedy committed to the lunar landing shortly after Shepherd's suborbital flight, and the idea from NASA was that they'd orbit the moon. Kennedy thought a landing would be more spectacular, but it took NASA quite a while to settle on lunar orbit rendezvous, let alone the Saturn V architecture.

Kennedy was on the verge of cancelling Apollo when he died, and Johnston was anything but a space expert. Johnson was definitely responsible for ensuring no American woman went to space until after he was out of office, the evidence is clear on that one.

The single person most responsible for getting America to the moon was probably John Houbolt (or perhaps Konstantin Tsiolkovsky).

There is also a lot of debate as to whether the ISS has been successful; this really depends on what your objectives were/are.

[1] John Logsdon's Bibligraphy

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/factsheets/Rendezv...

Johnson quite effectively used the space program as a form of political patronage, he used it to spread money and jobs around to potential voters, and it was structured in such a way to bring on key congressmen and senators to support the funding level needed.

I will argue quite firmly that without Johnson, there would be no moon landing or no space program as it developed later and as we know it now.

Weren't all of the people who went into space up until at least the mid 70s all naval/AF aviators/test pilots? Was there any chance for them to be women since women couldn't be test pilots back then?

Johnson had a meeting with some advocates who made the case for a couple of women being qualified to go to the moon (I believe the meeting took place at around the time of the selection of the second group of Gemini astronauts). If you look at his hand-written notes on the meeting agenda (included in a few document collections such as the Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration), you will see that Johnson appears to have rejected the idea for... personal reasons.

Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) was not a test pilot or military aviator.

Johnson is also basically the reason why most of this happened at all.

How so?

Johnson definitely did a lot of pork-barreling with the space program funds, but I think the main reason that Apollo went forward was because Kennedy had espoused a grand vision shortly before being shot. Without Lee Harvey Oswald, I doubt that Neil and Buzz would have made it to the moon, especially given Apollo 1.

Well money is important and it was Johnson who pushed the idea on Kennedy. Kennedy initial thought the idea pretty nonsense, Johnson early on saw NASA a soft-power instrument.

It's also questionable if we'd have made it to the moon had Kennedy not gotten shot. The "do it for the murdered President" motivation likely helped keep the schedule pushing forwards, at least to some extent.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90376962/if-president-kennedy-ha...