It’s been a week of people going in front of Congressional representatives and getting chewed out for various things… the oil companies had to go in front of a committee and defend the fact that they make money, Ben Bernanke had to appear on capitol hill and discuss the fact that people may be making less money for a while.

Now Wired is reporting that the House Democrats will be raking NASA over the coals about Project Constellation… it’s not as bad as you might think though.

Tomorrow morning, the House Committee on Science and Technology will challenge NASA’s vision for space exploration. According to a document on their website, the legislators are planning to grill NASA’s representatives:

• Does the exploration architecture, as laid out by NASA, present a technically and programmatically viable approach for executing exploration beyond low Earth orbit under a pay-as-you-go strategy?
• Is the United States on the right track to reach the Moon by 2020, establish an outpost there, and eventually send humans to Mars, or do any changes need to be made to the architecture or implementation plan?
• How will progress in implementing the architecture be measured?
• How sustainable will NASA’s planned exploration initiative be, given the assumed constrained budgetary outlook as well as the cutbacks in funding for long-lead exploration technology development?

Once again Wired isn’t quite right on this one… judging by the posted questions, Congress isn’t planning on questioning Project Constellation, it sounds more like they are just asking for a status report. Its actually pretty refreshing, given the tone coming from the Obama camp on the space program that Congress is asking if NASA will meet their goal of returning to the Moon by 2020… as opposed to trying to make some public statement that we shouldn’t be going back there at all (We should be, as soon as possible, regardless of what Obama says).

Also, how could the pay-as-you-go strategy not be viable? Obviously there are cost overruns when you’re doing something that’s never been done before, but the whole idea is that NASA would get a consistent amount of money which would then simply be used for different purposes as the program progressed… I know that’s a foreign concept to most people in the federal government, but it seems pretty straight forward to me. As a matter of fact we would be far better off if more agencies adopted that strategy.

On a somewhat related note, I got a press release the other day from a guy who says that we should immediately cut all of NASA’s funding, because Project Constellation is nothing but NASA’s attempt to start a new space race with the poor Chinese… who only want peaceful exploration of space.