Dwayne Day has a long, but worthwhile description of how bad the reporting has been on the president's space initiative, and the source of the mythical trillion dollar program.

Jeff Foust has a related piece on how badly the administration and particularly NASA has handled the media, with the danger that this president's space initiative may share the fate of his father's.

I remain very concerned about this program, because I think that the approach is fundamentally technically flawed. If Dennis Wingo is right, they've narrowed down the trade space far too much too early, by looking at a binary decision between building at ISS with EELVs (a bad idea for two reasons--ISS and EELV) or building a heavy lifter and replicating Apollo. Either approach will result in a program that's ultimately unsustainable, if it succeeds at all.

There are other options, but it requires new thinking that NASA is clearly not yet ready for. I think that the president's initiative would have a much better chance if he had set up a clean new agency, rather than giving it to the existing NASA, just as we did when NASA was established forty six years ago. It's not clear that Code T as such will be able to break out of NASA think as long as it's a code within the agency, rather than one that's independent.

Rand, if something else breaks on the orbiter, you may well get your wish.

With all 3 orbiters now getting those new switches that means Endeavor won't be flight ready until 2006, which means the 2nd orbiter flight cannot go until at least late 2005 which means the Europeans may well abandon ISS out of exasperated frustration before we ever get around to finishing it.

Not an all bad thing, IMHO.

Maybe the real plan is the plan you propose, Rand, only no one wants to announce all those layoffs in Florida or at Michoud before the election.