Honk if you don't think that Texas Congressman Lampson's new bill isn't basically just a means of energizing his pork-luvin' Houston constituents to support his bid for re-election in 5 months.

If his group really cared about space exploration, itself, they'd embrace fellow Democrat Lori Garver's idea of making NASA award PRIZES instead of pork-laden contracts. A prize got Linbergh across the Atlantic even as NASA Langley was accidentally flying planes into the water. With a $15 billion annual budget, couldn't NASA offer some hellacious prizes and thereby create all sorts of private sector jobs for all the unemployed (or underemployed) aerospace technicians out there?