The President’s ambitious new strategy pushes the frontiers of innovation to set NASA on a more dynamic, flexible, and sustainable trajectory that can propel us on a new journey of innovation and discovery.

Catch that? Pushing the frontiers of innovation to propel us on a journey of…innovation!

And of course it all must be sustainable. A word that is already has the early lead as the decade’s most meaningless.

Is it political at all? You bet your retro rockets it’s political.

Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, like Houston’s Johnson Space Center and Alabama’s Marshall Space Flight Center, face thousands of threatened layoffs from Obama’s decision to end space shuttle operations at the end of the year and scrap NASA’s $108 billion back-to-the-moon Constellation program.

But it is the swing state of Florida that is getting the president’s attention, not perennially GOP states like Texas and Alabama.

“The Obama administration could care less about offending Texas politically,” says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.

And here’s a mission video,

And Transterrestrial’s one-word subject on this post succinctly captures the midset of a key congressional committee’s chairperson.  Clearly the advantages of private sector investing their own money and competition is is completely opaque to the supergenius big brains who’ve somehow landed in the US government.

It’s time for NASA to back out. Space cannot be left to the modern equivalent of the WPA.

Richard Shelby (R-AL) is pushing it, fine, but would he be if the Marshall Space Flight Center wasn’t in his state? Being lashed electorally (in other words, addicted) to protecting taxpayer-funded obsolete job descriptions is as stifling in a space program as in any other facet of an economy.

Plenty of other mixed blessings in here too. Some bad news that sounds like good news, etc. For instance: Administration makes free enterprise noises about turning over hauling to the ISS to private companies. Sounds good, and they’d make much PR hay about that to counter other massive anti-commerce moves. But that would be a small price to pay for getting what they really want, a law to make NASA one part of some international space exploration effort. In other words, turn NASA over to the UN so it becomes a handy conduit for funneling US advanced aerospace technology to our international “partners.” Not too much between-the-lines-reading needed there. Well we suppose it might be slightly more space-oriented of a change than making it officially subsidiary to the EPA, which parts of it already seem to have become.

Meanwhile: “As it stands, the U.S. must rely on Russia to ferry its astronauts to the International Space Station for most of the next decade.”

No mixed blessing there. That the US needs to rely on Russia for anything…well, since it’s too late to be unacceptable, we suppose it must be accepted. This would put the US officially behind them again in the space race for the first time in more than 40 years.