Thanks for this link from commenters and emailers. It seems that some namby pambies are concerned about sending astronauts to Space Station Albatross, because its environmental systems are breaking down.

I don’t have time for a lot of commentary on this right now, but I’ll make two points.

First, this is the most important factor:

Station astronauts have consistently said they prefer to keep the orbiting facility occupied during the shuttles’ grounding and that they accept the attendant risks and discomfort. Foale and Kaleri are seasoned veterans, Foale having survived a collision and Kaleri a fire during their tours aboard the Russian Mir space station.

I tire of pantywaist politicians and bureaucrats, and those nervous nellies in the public who urge them on, deciding for other people how much risk they should take, particularly when taking risks is part of their job.

Now, I don’t really care if ISS falls into the ocean (though hopefully it will come in without hitting anything with actual value on land), but for people who don’t want to see a hundred-billion-dollar “investment” littering the seabottom, the notion that we should risk letting it do so because we don’t want to risk a couple of astronauts is ludicrous. Human life is priceless and invaluable to people who know and love the particular humans, but it’s not that invaluable. The government manages to put a value on it every day, in myriad ways, and this should be no exception.

But the second point is that this is the almost inevitable result of flawed space policy over the past three decades, in which we developed a fragile monoculture of a space transportation system, with which we’ve now built a fragile monoculture of a single, politically-driven-but-largely-useless facility in orbit.

NASA’s current manned spaceflight programs are largely irrelevant to our nation’s future in space, and any new policy that purports to care about that future must accept this reality, and rethink our entire approach to this frontier.