A Tale of Two Chambers

Abstract

As the dust from the battle over health care reform settled in the spring of 2010, a new, albeit much smaller, debate arose over he future of the American space program. Following the findings of a presidential blue ribbon panel in 2009, President Barack Obama proposed radical changes to the policy paradigm inherent with human spaceflight. The proposal centered on abolishing the then-burgeoning Project Constellation, which aimed to build a new family of rockets and space vehicles that would return humans to the moon by 2020 and invest instead in the privatized development of spacecraft that the United States, through NASA, would purchase. The shift in government-run and -built spaceflight to the utilization of privately built hardware was so fundamental that much criticism was leveled at it.