ISDC 2008 - Election 2008 Space Panel

Miles O'Brien was the moderator for this panel with representatives from the 3 major Presidential campaigns. In my opinion, the winner of the panel was ... Miles O'Brien. I thought his questions and occasional dialogs with the panelists were substantive, fair, important, relevant, and balanced. Great job.

My pick for second place would be Lori Garver representing Hillary Clinton. Of course Lori had an advantage in having a lot of personal experience with the National Space Society. It didn't seem like the others even knew their audience, or in 1 case what basic issues like ITAR are.

McCain's representative wins 3rd place, and Obama's wins 4th, in my undoubtably subjective ranking.

The panel was on C-SPAN, but I don't see any video links to it. I do see an option to buy a C-SPAN DVD of it for 30 bucks though.

Space Politics has a review and discussions. (I referred to this link for the names of the other 2 panelists, which I didn't know).

The so-so space debate - The Space Review

NASA Watch - ISDC on CSPAN Today

Here's what I got about prizes from the panel. Many other subjects were discussed.

In talking about commercial space, Lori (Clinton) mentioned prizes for exploration in other parts of Clinton's planks, with the implication that prizes would be favored in the space area, too.

Miles cited commercial excitement in areas like the X PRIZE in a question.

LG (Clinton) - She gave an example of the GLXP. NASA should not smother commerce and compete with commercial areas.

Floyd DesChamps (McCain) - He supports cash prizes, and sees them as a good stimulus and the type of thinking we need.

Question for Steve Robinson (Obama) - Would he fund cash prizes? He didn't really answer the question specifically. He said he would support innovation.