Of the VSE, and the disastrous NASA architecture choice, from Clark Lindsey. As he and Mark Wade note, what is old is new again.

[Update a few minutes later]

I hadn’t noticed the post title, which I love: “Apollo mistake on steroids.”

A response to Charles Krauthammer, from the science advisor and NASA administrator. As Jim Oberg notes in email, they don’t say that his op-ed is off base– they say that he is (i.e., a slightly more personal attack). This is highly unusual. Are they going to go after Tom Jones, too?

Terry Savage, a long-time space activist (and friend of three decades) is running to renew his term on the National Space Society board of directors. Here is his campaign statement, at his blog.

I link it because I find a strange cognitive dissonance within it:

Like any entity, NSS has limited resources, and the rules of “opportunity cost” apply. Any resources we invest in one activity, are not available for other activities. From my personal perspective, there is only one mission for the society that really matters: minimizing the time from this moment to the creation of thriving human communities in space. Space settlement. Space industrialization is essential to that result, as are many other supporting activities, but at the end of the day, space settlement is the bottom line. All activities should be tested against how well they support that core objective.

The problem isn’t primarily technological. Humanity is capable, right now, of creating self-sustaining human settlements in space. We simply choose not to do so.

On this note, I’ll say explicitly that the Obama proposal for NASA is a barely mitigated disaster. It has some good elements, like the emphasis on private sector development, but it has no clear focus of ANY KIND for the American manned space program. As a practical matter, Obama is proposing to kill the American manned space program. I think that’s wrong for the country, and I don’t like it.

There is a contrast between grafs one and three. Graf one is great — it matches up with the Space Frontier Foundation’s “Frontier Enabling Test,” (which, ironically, is not part of the NSS, but rather, part of the Space Frontier Foundation, which arose from the ashes of the L-5 Society/NSI merger, after the L-5ers realized that they’d been absorbed into the NASA-lobbying borg).

But the new policy meets that test much better than the previous one. There was little or no hope that Constellation would have opened up the frontier, even if fully funded. This is something that NSS generally, and Terry specifically, have never really understood. There is no plausible path from NASA’s “NASA uber alles” policy, in which billions are spent to send a few astronauts to a planet for some vague purpose, and space settlement. But NSS continually (despite occasional refreshing support for private activities) supports whatever NASA wants to do.

Well, until now, anyway. Which is doubly surprising and ironic, given that the people who came up with the new policy are former heads of NSS, including the Deputy Administrator, who said just last week:

Defending NASA’s new plans on both charges was deputy administrator Lori Garver. “We plan to transform our relationship with the private sector as part of our nation’s new strategy with the ultimate goal of expanding human presence across the solar system,” she said in a luncheon speech at the conference Thursday. “So don’t be fooled by those who say we have no goal. That is the goal.”

Turning to the private sector to launch both cargo and crews to LEO, she continued, actually lowered the risk to the agency in the long run by keeping it from relying on a single system for human access to orbit. “We will diversify our risk by funding a portfolio of highly-qualified competitors instead of a high-risk approach in which we fund only one system,” she said. “We’re going to see the most exciting space race that NASA’s seen in a long time, and there’s likely to be more than one winner.”

Does this sound like a policy to “kill the American manned space program”?

If so, I think that Terry owes an explanation of why, to NSS members he expects to vote for him, other than a belief in the Apollo Cargo Cult.

Some thoughts on the new policy from the Chair Force Engineer.

In a comment thread about Joe Fragola, the Michael Mann of spaceflight safety, is provided a list of the CE&R reports that Mike Griffin ignored when he came in to do Apollo on Geritol. I hope that people in charge of the new direction are reading them — there’s a lot of good stuff there.

Those notorious Obamaphiles, Newt Gingrich and Bob Walker, come out with praise for the new direction in space. This just shows how non-partisan an issue is, except to those who are hyperpartisan. If George Bush had come out with this policy, most conservatives (or at least Republicans) would have praised it. Had Barack Obama come up with the VSE and Constellation, he would have been hailed by many (though certainly not all) of the left as JFK redux, and many conservatives would have hated it. I wish that people would actually examine the issue on the merits.

…that we can build human outposts on the moon. Some useful thoughts from Richard Mains.

As he notes, we’re putting the cart before the horse when we insist on an architecture, right now, that can get us back to the moon, or anywhere beyond LEO. We cannot even get into LEO cost effectively (that’s what all the space policy fuss has really been about for the past five years), and until we solve that problem, it is crazy talk to think about lunar bases. Again this mentality is driven by the flawed myths of Apollo, in which we sprinted to the moon, bypassing LEO because we didn’t have time, and then abandoned it because it couldn’t be politically or affordably sustained. (By the way, another bit of historical ignorance on Krauthammer’s part was his worship of JFK as the visionary who led us there, when in fact he had doubts about it early on, was never a big fan of space, and it’s likely that it would have died if he hadn’t). As Richard says, we need to establish a solid foothold in LEO before we can think about the best way to go beyond it, and that means developing truly routine and affordable access to it. That’s the fundamental basis of the Space Access Society, because Henry Vanderbilt and others realized long ago that until we can afford to get into orbit, it’s pointless to dream about points beyond.

Right after the Columbia was lost, I wrote a piece along this theme:

I’ve written before about the fragility and brittleness of our space transportation infrastructure. I was referring to the systems that get us into space, and the ground systems that support them.

But we have an even bigger problem, that was highlighted by the loss of the Columbia on Saturday. Our orbital infrastructure isn’t just fragile–it’s essentially nonexistent, with the exception of a single space station at a high inclination, which was utterly unreachable by the Columbia on that mission.

Imagine the options that Mission Control and the crew would have had if they’d known they had a problem, and there was an emergency rescue hut (or even a Motel 6 for space tourists) in their orbit, with supplies to buy time until a rescue mission could be deployed. Or if we had a responsive launch system that could have gotten cargo up to them quickly.

As it was, even if they’d known that the ship couldn’t safely enter, there was nothing they could do. And in fact, the knowledge that there were no solutions may have subtly influenced their assessment that there wasn’t a problem.

The lesson we must take from the most recent shuttle disaster is that we can no longer rely on a single vehicle for our access to the new frontier, and that we must start to build the needed orbital infrastructure in low earth orbit, and farther out, to the moon, so that, in the words of the late Congressman George Brown, “greater metropolitan earth” is no longer a wilderness in which a technical failure means death or destruction.

NASA’s problem hasn’t been too much vision, even for near-earth activities, but much too little. But it’s a job not just for NASA–to create that infrastructure, we will have to set new policies in place that harness private enterprise, just as we did with the railroads in the 19th Century. That is the policy challenge that will come out of the latest setback–to begin to tame the harsh wilderness only two hundred miles above our heads.

Constellation did nothing toward that end. It in fact completely ignored the requirement, repeating Apollo with another unsustainable sprint across the wilds. The new policy holds some promise, finally, of addressing it.

John Strickland has some extensive thoughts on NASA’s new direction, and where we’ve been.