I hope some of you were able to watch - I very much enjoyed the testimony from chairs of previous similar commissions. Augustine in particular - you had to wince at each of the points he made about recommendations from 14 years ago that were never adopted.

By the way, I've been trying to track the progress on this over at sciscoop.

Contrary to some of the recommendations you folks have made, altering the plan to skip the Moon is not in the commission's scope. What they are in fact focusing on, from Aldridge's statements today, seems to be figuring out how to make structural changes to NASA and space policy within the executive branch to turn this into a sustainable activity that will withstand changes in president and congress, and year-in/year-out budget issues. There were a number of recommendations today that sounded like they might help toward that goal - one in particular was reconstituting an administration Space Advisory Council to guide space efforts across the federal government, including NASA, DOD, and other agencies. If you have thoughts on managerial or structural reform in such areas, I think that's what they'd really like to hear.

Of course, one other suggestion to sustain an effort was figuring out how to continually engage and commit the American people to the effort. Other than the basic concept of visible milestones along the way, nobody seemed to have a good suggestion on that though.