I was thinking about responding to Paul Spudis’s bizarre attempt to resurrect the Shuttle, but Clark Lindsey has spared me the trouble. In fact I had this exact thought when I read Paul’s post title:
…neutral would be a big improvement over reverse, which is where NASA has been going for the past decade. Constellation burned up many billions of dollars on a plan to build retro-tech vehicles that would have been just as expensive, if not more so, to operate than the Shuttle. The administration’s plan, of course, is not in neutral but is moving forward on development of cost-effective commercial launch systems, though this could be undermined by Congress’s insistence on parallel development of a super-expensive, super heavy lift vehicle based on Shuttle hardware.
And the double standard remains amazing:
Dr. Spudis asks,
How long will our rapidly growing government (with its rapidly shrinking discretionary budget) patiently support “commercial” New Space efforts?
This question is bizarre. The alternative to the modestly funded commercial launch services program is another gigantically expensive in-house NASA project that has no more chance of succeeding than all of the previous gigantically expensive NASA space transport projects. There is, in fact, no alternative to commercial launchers. If they don’t succeed at providing reliable transport at significantly lower costs than the Shuttle, NASA’s human spaceflight program will simply fade away. Fortunately, there is a very strong likelihood that they will succeed.
As Clark notes, it’s ironic that Paul continues to champion transportation approaches with the least probability of achieving his goal of a practical lunar base.