Rick Tumlinson eloquently states many of my concerns with NASA's (and specifically Mike Griffin's) approach to getting back to the moon:

...it is tempting to harken back to the “good ol' days” of Apollo, when a focused and NASA in-house-dominated team carried out an incredible program and put us on the Moon in under 10 years. This seems to be the model Griffin is adopting. Unfortunately, for all its virtues, this is a deeply and fatally flawed model. Yes, it got us to the Moon. But it could not keep us there. Whatever societal and political blame you wish to make, centralizing and institutionalizing our national space agenda set it up to be unsustainable once it reached its stated goal.

Imitating Apollo will result in the same end -- if it even gets that far -- for the costs of today's program far exceeds the available funding. According to some sources, even if NASA shuts down all the nonrelevant field centers it now operates, fires all the employees at those centers, kills all the research we are ostensibly going to do on the way out, tosses the space station into the trash, retires its private jets and makes its managers fly coach, the money just isn't there.

He's optimistic, though for other reasons. Here's one of them, from a talk the administrator gave yesterday to the Space Transportation Association (kudos to Keith Cowing for getting a transcript up so quickly). I'll have more to say about Dr. Griffin's remarks later, but they're very encouraging.

[Both links via Clark Lindsey]

Private jets? The Guppy is prop driven.

The old Vomet Comet sits on a pedestal at Ellington, and two T-38s are improving the entrance to Space Center Houston. That's 3 down in Houston alone. Add the B-52 mothership to the list as well.

Of course, we did replace the Dash-8 with a DC-9, but the Abbey fleet is getting smaller.

One would hope the SCA's and STA's would be retired shortly after 2010.

Damning the current plan by comparing it with Apollo is essentially a rhetorical gambit. There is no crash program.

Creation of an infrastructure that can support profitable private sector activity in space is a must. But, by definition, the private sector does only that which is profitable. I think it remains a very open question if there's money to be made creating the infrastructure to move beyond LEO. I don't doubt, though, once it does exist, the private sector will taken advantage of it.

It took taxpayer's money to build our highways, our airports and the infrastructure that supports civil and commerical aviation. If Griffin goes about his exploration with the intent of leaving a working infrastructure behind after the missions are completed, more power to him. Especially because I want those missions done and do not believe the private sector will consider them profitable for at least the next several decades, if ever.

Rick's point wasn't that its a crash program but that all of the work is being moved in house and that Griffin seems to be interpreting the goal to be "put x number of humans somewhere on the moon because the president told us to". Now, with Griffin's recent announcement it appears that he's at least thinking about it commercialization but only with respect to the ISS which isn't on his long term requirements list.

BTW, all of the early airports were private strips built in people's fields. The number of very large airports that are being turned private or even ar starting out that way is increasing. Plus the entire railroad industry was privately funded but with legal incentives (land rights) not financial ones.

Although I agree with the jist of Billg's comments, Michael makes some good points. Unfortunately, the US doesn't control many "rights" in respect to space, so it is difficult to provide those things as incentives. We cannot provide "airspace rights" or rights to a short-term monopoly in regards to space access. So the incentive carrot will be very imaginative.

Much as I flinch while writing this, maybe the model is closer to the British/French consortium that gave us the Concorde. Really, its not far off the Boeing model that gave us the first large scale commercial transports derived from the B-29 and later the 707 derived from the Dash-8 (KC-135). We might have more and safer shuttles today if Rockwell was allowed to sell them for private use.

Wow, utopia sure looks nice...

First, locate a business model that does not require the inflow of federal tax dollars to be successful.

Then, explain why that business model cannot succeed today, using Russian lift (Proton at $1000 per pound to LEO for example) purchased off the shelf. Build a Proton launch pad in equatorial Brazil and we go below $800 per pound.

NASA procurement can and certainly should be reformed but until there is private sector demand and private sector profit without taxpayer funding its not free market and is not sustainable long term.

>>"...Griffin seems to be interpreting the goal to be "put x number of humans somewhere on the moon because the president told us to".

That's a pretty good synopsis of what Bush did tell NASA to do. I applaud Griffin's rhetoric about bringing in the private sector in a new way, but, like anyone else running an agency of the Executive Branch, he dances to a tune called by the President.

I won't argue one way or the other about how some early airports began, but I think it is unquestionable that rather a lot of taxpayer money has gone into the infrastructure that supports aviation and ground transport, and that, in fact, a great deal of it would not exist if it was solely reliant on profit. (And, didn't a substantial amount of funding for some railroads come from the railroad firms selling off land adjacent to the right of way that had been given to them by the government?)

>>"NASA procurement can and certainly should be reformed but until there is private sector demand and private sector profit without taxpayer funding its not free market and is not sustainable long term."

That's true only so long as the government is unwilling to sustain it in the long term. Assuming "it" refers to human space travel beyond LEO (and not NASA procurement reform), I have to doubt that it will ever be sustainable within a free market context. Again, the market only does that which is profitable. Much that we ought to do in space will not be profitable. The role of government ought to be to fund both unprofitable things the voters support and, as well, to fund those unprofitable things that will enable the expansion of private profitable activity in space.

...didn't a substantial amount of funding for some railroads come from the railroad firms selling off land adjacent to the right of way that had been given to them by the government?

Yes, but that didn't represent an outlay from the tazpayer, because at the time the government did that, the land was essentially worthless. It only became valuable as a result of the railroad being built.

There's a lesson there, in the context of current treaties that don't facilitate property rights off planet...