I often have a sense that opponents of the new policy fear it not because they are afraid that private enterprise isn’t up to the job, but because they are afraid that it is. Here’s an example of what I mean, over in comments at the Lori Garver interview:

Simply speaking the reset button has been hit again and once more our astronauts are left standing on the pad with no ship to take them to where no man has gone before. We will one day get back to the moon, but my only fear is that the landing will be covered live by a CNN crew who landed on the last Virgin Galactic flight.

This is an interesting comment, and I’d like to understand more. First, what does the commenter mean by “we”? Does he (or she) mean the nation? Does he mean NASA? Does he mean literally himself and others?

And does he fear it because it is a non-American company? Or because it’s a private company?

If he means that his fear is that NASA will get to the moon, but be (as I’ve noted in the past) greeted by the concierge at the Lunar Hilton, why does he “fear” it? Do any of my readers have such a fear? If so, why? Do you think it a rational fear (in the sense that it is actually something to be feared, independent of how likely it is to occur)?

A point that Jim Muncy (or Henry Vanderbilt, or both) made last night in the wrap-up session was that he have to keep stamping down this nonsense that the new policy is the end of human spaceflight. Unfortunately, it’s like whack-a-mole. Here’s the latest, over at American Thinker:

America’s subsequent triumph in space, as the first and only nation to land men on the moon and safely return them, is the greatest achievement of the 20th century. So it makes perverted sense for Obama to destroy our pride in this matchless accomplishment and stage our humiliation before the world. America, which once deployed masterly innovation, commitment and daring to vanquish the Soviets in space, is now deliberately stranding seven astronauts in orbit with no way home except to hitch a ride from the Russians. We’ve surrendered the New Frontier.

The symbolism is breathtaking. From now on, whenever we remember with pride the courage and sacrifice of the Mercury astronauts, or Neil Armstrong taking “One small step for a man, one giant step for mankind,” or Jim Lovell and the crew of Apollo 13 calmly tinkering with duct tape to repair their capsule, we’ll quickly deflate with the afterthought: “Oh yeah. Now the Russians do that. We don’t.” There will always be a punchline, an asterisk, an anti-climactic stain at the end of the story.

Hey, lady? News flash. That was the Bush administration policy. And with that plan, we were not only going to be without a means to get to the space station before 2017 (and likely later), but at that point in time, we wouldn’t even have a space station. So if you’re going to complain about “surrender in space,” you’re six years late, and blaming the wrong guy.

Explained, by Jeff Greason (it’s buried in the comments, so I thought I’d post it up front here):

A little disappointed in the debate above.

I’m going to try, one more time, to explain flexible path. It isn’t hard. You just have to read what we said rather than try to do Kremlinology on what you think we must have meant.

I’ll boil it down the same way that I explained it to policy makers.

* We want to go to Mars.
* We can’t reasonably go to Mars without more experience with long-duration missions.
* Long-duration missions can be done to Lagrange points, NEO’s, and Phobos/Deimos and they are all worthwhile missions in their own right.
* We can’t reasonably go to Mars without updating our experience doing manned planetary exploration.
* Manned planetary exploration would be done on the Moon, which is a worthwhile mission in its own right, and could be a source of propellant for exploration.
* The Moon vs. Mars vs. NEO’s is therefore a FALSE CHOICE; the only choice we have is what sequence we do them in.
* Therefore, the only reasonable way to proceed is to accept that we MUST plan to do all of these things and plan accordingly.
* Since the spacecraft, lander, and boosters/EDS’s are the expensive part, constrained budget says develop 1 or at most 2 of them first.

Now, the version of this in the Augustine report was:
* Do the boosters/EDS’s and spacecraft first
* Do buildup flights in LEO, Lagrange, Cislunar, NEO’s
* Do Lunar landings
* Do Mars
(whether Phobos came before or after Lunar landings really wasn’t clear, it depends on how the technologies shake out).

Look at the mission timeline in the report, under flexible path, and you see Lunar landings, NEO visits, and Phobos visits before Mars. Construing that as “abandoning the moon” or “don’t touch” requires one to either refuse to read the report, to assume we only meant part of what we said, or to be dishonest.

Today, as it seems the NASA budget may not support doing 2 elements at once, I would suggest we do one at a time:
* spacecraft
* then boosters
* then landers

Because that way we can begin the exploration sequence with spacecraft on existing boosters and build the (relatively modest) upgraded boosters we need for more agressive missions as we go.

Makes sense to me. But the “look but don’t touch” morons will continue to be confused. I’m sure that we’ll be discussing this this evening, on a panel on which Jeff and I will be on, at the conference.