The title of this post should be the title of Tom Jones’ editorial over at the New York Post, in his defense of NASA’s current architecture and plans:

The shuttle’s successor, Orion, won’t fly until at least 2015. Some critics have called for NASA to scrap Orion’s new booster and go back to the drawing board. More worrisome, President Obama has left NASA leaderless since his inauguration, and proposes over the next four years to cut $3.1 billion from the Constellation program designed to develop Orion and its new Ares I booster. It’s hard to see how either approach will reduce the four-year “gap” between 2011 and 2015, when America will have no human launch capability, forcing our astronauts to ride Russian rockets to the space station.

The last sentence presumes that minimizing the gap should be NASA’s, and the nation’s highest priority in government-funded human spaceflight, to the exclusion of whether or not we get a good solution, or a cost-effective one. Obviously, anyone who has been reading me for long knows that I vehemently disagree.

Augustine said last week that his panel will also evaluate alternatives to the much-debated Ares I rocket booster. But Ares I has been in development for five years, with a first unmanned test flight scheduled for this fall. With adequate funding, I’m sure it can get Orion to orbit.

A review of NASA’s management and program execution is prudent, but also invites further delay in getting Orion flying. Building our first new manned spaceship in thirty-five years will be difficult, but NASA’s people are up to the challenge, just as they are proving with Hubble. If given the resources, I know they will launch Orion, and make it both safer and cheaper to operate than the shuttle. Its Ares boosters will be able to send its crews to the moon and beyond, to nearby asteroids.

The fact that Ares I has been in development for five years, but still hasn’t completed a Preliminary Design Review, should be a hint to Dr. Jones that there may be a problem with the program, or NASA’s management of it, and one that goes beyond a simple lack of funding. And there is little relationship between the supposedly upcoming “umanned test flight” and the actual vehicle design. Many program insiders have claimed that it is a Potemkin test, a public relations exercise to spectacularly demonstrate program “progress,” rather than one designed to give us much insight into actual Ares hardware performance.

There is no doubt in my mind that, given sufficient funding and time, NASA can launch something resembling Orion with something that may resemble Ares I. But it doesn’t follow that allowing them to do so would be a good idea. As I noted in my piece at PJM this past week, even ignoring all of the intrinsic technical issues with the Ares concept, even if it goes as NASA plans, it’s simply not worth the money. All it does is return us to the expensive days of Apollo, and is a huge step backward in capability.

For instance, we just saw the assembly of the ISS, and we are seeing the successful repair and upgrade of the Hubble as I type these words. I assume that Tom is aware that Ares/Orion would have no capability to do either of these things, despite a cost per flight comparable to, and perhaps even higher than that of the Shuttle, after amortizing development costs? (I should note that this is particularly amazing considering that Tom played a major role in that, with three ISS EVAs.)

We have built up a huge experience base of orbital operations over the past two decades, with satellite retrievals and repair, and the assembly of a huge structure in orbit. But NASA’s future plans completely abandon and ignore this capability, returning to the Apollo mentality of putting everything up in a single (or at most two) launches, and not preparing us at all, or at least long putting off the day for things like a Mars mission, for which it would simply be impractical, if not impossible, to stage without orbital assembly.

Once satisfied that our trajectory in space is correct, the President should dedicate the funds to meet those goals. In spending terms, NASA’s annual budget is miniscule: $18.3 billion next year, just one half of one percent of the $3.6 trillion federal outlay. Failing to correct NASA’s chronic budget shortfalls, on the other hand, will cede U.S. leadership in space even as we celebrate Apollo’s landmark achievements.

Yes, it’s a half of a percent, but that’s an artifact of the insane explosion of the federal budget this year, not because NASA is being particularly squeezed. In a normal budget, it would be about what it normally is, a percent or so.

But the problem isn’t the money. As I noted above, there seem to be two implicit assumptions in Tom’s piece — first, that reducing the gap is of paramount importance (though even there, he ignores the possibility of Falcon 9/Dragon), and that we should be willing to spend whatever it takes to not only make that happen, but to get back to the moon the way NASA proposes to do so.

Like the Constellation architecture itself, this was the mentality of Apollo. The program’s driving phrase was “waste anything but time.”

But it made sense then, because while space exploration was no more important then that it is now (i.e., not very), beating the Soviets to the moon was, as a key propaganda element of the Cold War, and it was justified to spend vast amounts of money to achieve that goal, despite the fact that it was so economically inefficient that we chose to no longer spend the money on that architecture once the goal was achieved.

We have to consider the possibility, which I hope Augustine will, that in fact the Ares concept is a poor use of taxpayer dollars if we want to have a cost-effective and mission-effective system. Tom’s editorial assumes a priori that there is no better way to go. But if there is, it’s certainly worth a year or three of additional gap. After all, we lived with a gap in the seventies while the Shuttle was under development, and the world didn’t come to an end. And if the private sector is sufficiently motivated, it is likely that it can solve the gap problem much faster than a fully funded Ares, particularly given that the confidence that it can hit the delayed 2015 date is so low.

I like Tom, but this is just NASA boosterism, and I don’t agree that it would be good policy, for either the taxpayers, or for those of us who want to see the US develop serious space capability.

[Update a couple minutes later]

Phil Plait has more boosterism at the Post. Again, it’s the typical plea for more money for NASA, on the assumption that money is all that is lacking, with no serious (or in this case, even unserious) thoughts as to how the money should be spent. And when he says that we need a “modern Apollo program,” it’s an indication to me that he doesn’t really understand what the Apollo program was all about.

What we need is a modern space policy, more attuned to the traditional national values of individualism and free enterprise than NASA has ever been.