I'm starting to really dislike your deceit and evasion on this thread.
This scheduling of this is no accident. I watched the head of NASA today extolling Obama's plan to privatize space exploration.
"”In 2006, NASA awarded the company a Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract to design and demonstrate a launch system to resupply cargo to the International Space Station (ISS)""
Once again, who was President of the United States in 2006, Mr. kabar?
"Once again, we have the opportunity to raise the bar, to demonstrate what human beings can do if we are challenged and inspired to reach for something just out of our grasp but not out of our sights.
President Obama has given us a Mission with a capital "M" -- to focus again on the big picture of exploration and the crucial research and development that will be required for us to move beyond low Earth orbit. He's charged us with carrying out the inspiring missions that only NASA can do, which will take us farther than we've ever been –to orbit Mars and eventually land on it.
He's asked us to startplanning a mission to an asteroid, and right now our Dawn spacecraft is approaching one of the biggest in the solar system, Vesta, and we’re scheduled to drop into orbit around that asteroid the middle of this month. What it finds out could help inform such a mission. The President is asking us to harness that American spirit of innovation, the drive to solve problems and create capabilities that is so embedded in our story and has led us to the Moon, to great observatories, and to humans living and working in space, possibly indefinitely.
Fifty years ago, a young President gave NASA a grand challenge, one chosen not for its simplicity, but for its audacity, to "best measure and organize our collective energies and skills." In accomplishing that goal, NASA not only defined America, it made a lasting imprint on the economic, national security and geopolitical landscape of the time.
Today, we have another young President, Barack Obama, who has outlined an urgent national need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build our competitors and create new capabilities that will take us farther into the solar system and help us learn even more about our place in it.
President Obama not only honors the Kennedy space legacy, but also again challenges the nation with his vision for the NEXT ERA of exploration. And NASA is ready for this grand challenge."
If these statements are not barf worthy enough, Bolden couldn't praise Obama enought just after the Dragon launch and capture. It is all propaganda. It reminds me of when Obama trotted out the Volt as the answer to America's pollution problem and global warming.