Over at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Alex Roth has an op-ed piece that is simulteneously insightful and inane. It's no mean trick to pull that off, but he manages to do so. He correctly identifies some of the problems with NASA:
The trouble is that the space program's purposes are inseparable from its Cold War-era context.
...but immediately follows with this pointless slur:
The very concept of a "space station," for example, is a 1952 brainchild of Nazi rocket scientist-turned-American-Cold Warrior Wernher von Braun, who was later caricatured as "Dr. Strangelove" in Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Cold War satire film.

I enjoy a good rant as much as anyone (OK, probably more than most), and Roth has certainly written a stem-winder. Unfortunately getting a few small points right is not enough. The editorial is well written from a polemical standpoint, but it utterly destroys a strawman that nobody in either the alt.space or NASA communities believes.

It's worth a few minutes just to familiarize yourself with his arguments, since they will be coming up again, and it's good to know what the other side is saying.

Well, he starts with the assumption that manned spaceflight has no value without offering any evidence to support that assertion. He even makes a snide comment about spaceshipone. He takes it(lack of value in human spaceflight) as a given and goes from there.

Destroy that assumption and most of his argument collapses on itself. He goes on to establish his credentials as a typicaly lefty thru various innuendo.

I smell him out as a "Give the money to social programs instead" lefty.

Mike - you're right, and I was being a bit generous with him. I think it's good that the realization is out there that NASA suffers from cold war holdover problems, even among those hostile to the program.

I think you correctly identify his position on the political spectrum, too.

I'm glad you caught this, and my opinion of the whole thing is the same as Mike's. My response to Alex would be, "Don't give up your day job!"

Well, Mr. Roth had better brace himself for when I, as an aerospace engineer, turn my poison keyboard to the topic of commercial real estate credit analysis (his chosen field).

On the positive side, he didn't repeat the gross exaggerations on cost, simply referring to "tens of billions"