Fresh from his previous escapade into unreality, Loren Thompson has another ignorant (or perhaps he’s just lying — not sure which is worse) post at Forbes about space:

The federal government is planning to spend $19 billion on NASA’s civil space program next year, and yet the agency’s signature mission — human exploration of space — seems to be in its death throes. The Obama Administration has canceled plans it inherited to send astronauts back to the Moon, the Space Shuttle is about to retire, and the only near-term human space flight initiative on the books is a handout to rich California businessmen to update old technology. You’d think that with the nation in the midst of an identity crisis, the White House could have come up with something a little more inspiring.

Congress has stepped in to stop the administration from destroying the human space flight industrial base, but it doesn’t really have a vision of what NASA should be aiming to achieve. So here’s a vision: send humans to Mars by the early 2030s, and do it without spending any more money than NASA was planning to spend anyway. Mars is the only other earth-like planet in the known universe. It has water, it may contain life, and it could eventually sustain a human colony. By organizing the human spaceflight program with Mars in mind, NASA can develop a near-term investment and exploration agenda that gets us somewhere interesting without any additional commitment of funding. And in the process, maybe it can help America get its sense of purpose back.

Emphasis mine.

Let’s ignore the silliness about Apollo to Mars. What in the world is he talking about? Who has gotten a “handout”? If he’s referring to Elon Musk, he has been delivering specified milestones on a fixed price, at a very low cost to the taxpayer relative to most other NASA human spaceflight activities. Why is that a “handout” but billions of dollars in cost-plus payments to Lockheed Martin (among others), who fund his Lexington Institute (among others) is not? And if he is referring to Elon, who are the others (note he used the plural)? How about Boeing and CST, out of Houston? Is that a “rich California businessman”?

And what does he mean by “updating old technology”? Does mean like building rockets and capsules based on Apollo designs, and thirty-year-old Shuttle hardware, and then planning to use the horrifically expensive results for the next half century, as Mike Griffin planned with Constellation? Is he completely bereft of a sense of irony and hypocrisy?

Why does anyone take people like him seriously?