RAND SIMBERG: Space Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows.

Staffers for California’s Democratic Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein were no doubt nonplussed to discover that their bosses had been praised by the Tea Party on Monday. It’s all of a piece of the political bizarro world in which space policy has been immersed for the last year and a half, ever since the Obama administration canceled the disastrous Constellation program in favor of a more commercial approach, and the response of many supposed conservatives in Congress was to demand a “public option.” . . . Which all goes to show (as we’ve seen for the last year and a half) that space policy is truly non-partisan, and non-ideological, and it is driven primarily by rent seeking, not a desire to open up space to humanity. As long as space policy remains unimportant, it will continue to be subject to the petty politics of those whose states and districts benefit from the jobs created, even as wealth is destroyed. But the good news is that this may delay things sufficiently long that an expensive, unnecessary rocket never gets built at all.

Read the whole thing.