| >Okay.. then how do they connect that back to specific senators in the minds of the voters to help them get elected? I feel like this should be obvious? The work is distributed across the country, but a state like New York or California is obviously less dependent on jobs from this than other states. >Was that simply because he was a senator or because he was on a _specific_ committee? Do we want to get into how committee assignments are handed out? Or how that particular "power" actually functions? He was on the senate appropriations committee, and considering that 30% of the senate is on the committee and we don't get to control who gets on it, I'd argue it still supports the point that senators have much more than just "fantastically small power" as you put it. >SLS was officially started in 2011. SpaceX just had it's first successful launch and public verification of their platform in 2008. The situation today is different than it was when SLS was being put together. I think it's worth understanding in that context. That doesn't cover the insistence from Congress on using it today and for the next 30 years. >Maintaining cryogenics in orbit is actually harder than people admit and you're resting a huge part of your argument on a very shaky ideal here. If only any serious research on long term cryogenic storage in orbit had been permitted, we'd know exactly how hard it is! |