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Dayton
Daily News Editorial
NASA changed signals
on Ohio, Midwest
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Ohio and Texas politicians have found something to agree about: NASA
should be investigated for its process for awarding the
soon-to-be-retired space shuttles.
Hours after the decision was announced that the Air Force museum in
Dayton and the Johnson Space Center in Houston were among the unhappy
losers, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and U.S. Reps. Mike Turner, Steve
Austria, Marcy Kaptur and Steven LaTourette asked for the GAO to
investigate the selection process. The GAO is Congress’ independent
watchdog.
Meanwhile, Houston officials are saying they, too, want an
investigation. That city has suspected for some time that it was going
to be shut out, and it has been publicly nipping at NASA.
Shuttle backers there, for instance, held a press conference where
widows of Columbia astronauts spoke of the need to honor those who gave
their lives for the program. The appeal almost seemed exploitative.
The GAO is known for doing exhaustive work, and maybe the agency would
find that the selection process was horribly flawed. But the decisions
to send a shuttle to Los Angeles and a test shuttle to New York are not
likely to be overturned.
The best that could come out of an investigation — which NASA has said
it welcomes — is that the space agency would be metaphorically indicted
for sloppiness or goofy criteria.
Shouldn’t NASA have to account for itself? Shouldn’t its process be
scrutinized? Yes, but it was Congress that made the rule to leave the
ultimate decision to the NASA administrator. Congress didn’t mandate a
public, competitive process with clearly spelled-out criteria. It
allowed subjectivity to be built into the decision-making.
Sen. Brown aggressively tried to persuade the White House and NASA that
the Air Force and Dayton deserved a shuttle, and he and Reps. Turner
and Austria also lobbied NASA hard. You do have to wonder, though,
whether the results would have been any different if Sen. Brown had
been persuasive that there was political advantage for the president to
send a shuttle to Ohio, or if House Speaker John Boehner, of West
Chester, had been more than an obligatory advocate.
That would have been an ugly way to win, but, in a process involving
more good choices than shuttles, the case for the Air Force and Dayton
stacked up impressively. The politicians couldn’t have been
legitimately accused of just playing politics.
One thing that’s galling people in Ohio and Dayton is the suggestion
that the coasts were favored because Dayton lacked easy exposure to
international visitors. That criterion was new to people here, and it
is inconsistent with other messages from NASA.
Applicants did understand they needed to be within easy reach of the
public, but the public was seen as taxpayers, not international
visitors. NASA also said it wanted to know how the museums would
promote science education, but that consideration was about educating
this country’s young people.
The international focus came out of nowhere and feels like a barrier
thrown up at the last minute to justify putting all the shuttles on the
coasts.
The space agency used its latitude in a way that has invited bitter
criticism that is not motivated just by disappointment. Considering the
prizes were so valuable and so sought-after, you’d think that NASA
would have had answers for places that fell short. It doesn’t have good
ones.
Read it at the Dayton Daily News
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