Jeff Foust has found the most egregiously awful reporting of the Scaled Composites explosion yet.

Amidst huge entitlement programs, paying farmers not to grow food, pork and boondoggles, the nation’s transportation infrastructure has been badly neglected, and is quite brittle. It also makes one wonder how many other ticking time bombs there are out there.

This applies to space transportation as well. A category three hurricane could wipe out NASA’s manned space program. On some days, I’m not sure that would be a bad thing. It would force them to do something different, and break us out of the rut we’ve been in since Apollo.

Of course, there’s a big difference. The highway infrastructure was a huge improvement over the past, offering affordable mobility to hundreds of millions of Americans, with a great deal of redundancy and resiliency. The space transportation infrastructure has never been affordable to anyone but the government, or able to support more than a few dozen people in orbit per year, and it’s always been quite fragile, with no backups. Until we address this issue, we’ll never be a spacefaring nation, or accomplish the things there that many of use want. But all that NASA offers is more of the same.

Seriously. I’m sure that he’s a fine engineer, and manager, but why does that mean that we should give his opinion more weight than anyone else’s on the subject of space goals? Just because someone is an expert at implementing a space program doesn’t make them one at justifying it, or determining what it should be.

As is always the case with stories like this, there are implicit underlying assumptions that are never stated. In order to argue where we should be going, one first has to decide why are going into space at all, and that’s not a subject that ever really gets discussed. I assume that Mr. Gavin is into space “exploration,” and assumes that everyone else shares that justification. He thinks that when it comes to the moon, we’ve “been there, done that,” and it’s time to go “explore” somewhere else, and that Mars is much more interesting. But what if the goal is instead, space development, or space defense, or geoengineering, or energy production? In that case, Mars makes no sense at all, and the people who want to send humans there should pay for it themselves.

Of course, I continue to wish that we could get a consensus from all the people with disparate space goals that the best approach is to make space access affordable, which will enable them all. Unfortunately, NASA is only making things worse in that regard (unless COTS, despite the paltry sums being spent on it, succeeds).

[Late afternoon update]

Rampant sarcasm has broken out in comments on this subject at Space Politics.

In the wake of last week’s tragedy, Leonard David has a report on space marsupial progress. He also has a roundup of reactions to the Mojave deaths.

Thomas James righteously rails against it. If humans settle space, we will take human institutions with us, and the ones that have proven successful here will do so there as well.

…without it being administered by imbeciles.

…without it being administered by imbeciles.

…without it being administered by imbeciles.

Allison Gatlin has the latest on the test explosion in Mojave. There are quotes from Jeff Foust and Brett Alexander, including this one, with which I agree:

“Because of the nature of this accident, I think that there will be limited media attention from here on out of this accident,” Foust said. “I suspect that you’ll see a lot more coverage over the next few days of NASA’s peccadilloes – intoxicated astronauts and sabotaged computers – than you will of this accident. As a result, this is going to be out of the general public’s minds pretty quickly, outside of those directly affected by the accident.”

It’s ironic and amusing that NASA’s latest foibles may knock the biggest accident to affect NewSpace off the headlines, but I think he’s right.

[Update in the evening]

Aaaarrrgghhh…

This is one of my biggest pet peeves:

“Today, as we are focused on the human side of this mishap we can’t loose sight of what it is we choose to do and to whom we serve,” airport General Manager Stu Witt said Friday.

It’s bad enough when people do it on unedited internet fora, but you’d think that professional editors and reporters could get it right. I wonder if it’s going to become the accepted spelling, because we can no longer hold back the tide of ignorance?

And yes, I know it’s confusing, as demonstrated a few grafs later:

“Our nation enjoys the safest transportation system the world has known, largely because people like the ones who populate the companies engaged in systems research and testing at Mojave, Edwards and China Lake choose this location to practice their craft,” Witt said.

Same pronunciation, different spelling. Yes, English has idiosyncratic spelling conventions. But again, professional writers and editors are paid to know the difference.

When I saw Glenn Reynolds in Dallas at the ISDC in May, he mentioned to me that he’d been reading a review copy of Rocketeers on the airplane, to prepare for a review he was going to write for the Wall Street Journal in conjunction with its release. Well, he was (as usual) true to his word (subscription only, though). As Clark Lindsey notes, the Powerline guys have an excerpt for the subscription challenged.