Over at Reason, Ted Balaker takes a whack at NASA. It’s not always fair:

When I interviewed him earlier this year, X Prize winner Burt Rutan pointed out that after almost half a century of manned space flight, NASA still hasn’t achieved the kind of safety breakthroughs his small team achieved in a just a few years. Take the “care-free re-entry” design. It allows Rutan’s SpaceShipOne to align itself automatically for reentry, making it much safer to plunge back into the earth’s atmosphere. Although Rutan’s ship only returns from suborbital space, the design takes the traditionally complex process of reentry and makes it simple.

Emphasis mine. That “although” makes all the difference. Burt’s approach wouldn’t work for an orbital entry, and it’s not a valid comparison. Entry from orbit is a tough problem, and it’s going to take a lot of experience and approaches to figure out how to do it safely.

And when he writes:

…when they’re not swimming in tax dollars, inventors come to appreciate the value of simplicity. Take the hatch, for example. Private astronaut Brian Binnie explained to The Space Review’s Eric Hedman that SpaceShipOne’s hatch opens inward and has no moving parts. Binnie estimates that it costs a couple hundred bucks. Compare that to the multimillion dollar shuttle hatch which swings outward and requires complicated mechanisms to seal it for flight.

While the principle of parsimony is good, this is a dumb example. NASA’s hatch designs are a legacy of the Apollo I fire. I hope that Burt doesn’t kill too many people before he figures out that there are sometimes good reasons for the way NASA does things.

I do agree with this, though, at least in concept if not detail:

How many cosmic hints does NASA need to realize that it might not be long before it’s eclipsed by space entrepreneurs? If it wants to stay in the game, NASA should move from player to manager: Spell out the mission, offer a nice reward for its completion, and kick back until someone collects the dough. NASA could borrow from a suggestion made by the Aldridge Report, itself the result of a presidential commission, and offer, say, $1 billion “to the first organization to place humans on the Moon and sustain them for a fixed period.”

Speaking of a new space age, this is a real coup for XCOR. It’s been a long slog since the EZ-Rocket first flew, four years ago, but they may now be able to raise the money they need to build a vehicle, and not just engines. In fact, in rereading that old post, it’s remarkable how prescient it was:

While EZ-Rocket doesn’t fly high, or fast–unlike NASA’s reusable rocket programs–it actually flies. And in fact, though it doesn’t fly particularly high, or fast, it is a testament to the neglect of this field that, had XCOR bothered to call the appropriate French certification agency to have them witness today’s flight, they would have simultaneously awarded it the new world’s records for height, speed, and time to climb for a rocket plane.

It not only flies, but it can, given small amounts of money (equivalent to just a fraction of the overruns on programs like X-34 and X-33), fly every day, or twice a day, for mere hundreds of dollars per flight. And the experience developed from it can lead to bigger, faster rocket planes, that can also fly every day, or twice or thrice a day, and teach us how to fly rocket planes, and by selling experiment time, or even (heaven forfend!) rides to wealthy people who want a thrill, make a little money while doing it. We may have rocket racing competitions, sponsored by ESPN, or the Xtreme Sports Channel, or Pratt & Whitney.

Now, let’s hope this prediction works out as well:

And the records will get faster, and higher, and the revenues will grow, until we are offering rides to orbit, and people (with fortunes less than Bill Gates and Larry Ellison) are buying. And then some crazy fool will develop a space suit, and haul up enough parts to build a space hotel, and we’ll offer week-long stays, instead of barn-storming joy rides. And someone else will actually rent space in the hotel and perhaps do some research, or figure out how to build something bigger, like a Mars mission vehicle, that can be afforded by the Planetary Society, or the Mars Society, or even the (renamed?) National Geographic Society.

Jon Goff has similar thoughts, and congratulations to XCOR.

[Update at 10 AM EDT]

Michael Belfiore has more:

Initially XCOR will build 10 rocket racers. My editor tells me that these babies will cost $1 million each, so that will be a nice boost to XCOR’s finances.

It will indeed, assuming that they can build them for less than that (and I think that’s a pretty good assumption).

Belfiore also has a story in Wired about John Carmack and Armadillo.

Two years from today, it will have been half a century since the launch of Sputnik and the beginning of the old space age. Sadly, rather than initiate a new one, NASA seems determined to prolong the old one.

Clark Lindsey points out that, while there may be many good arguments against NASA’s human spaceflight program, the notion that we can’t afford it is ludicrous.

It’s really tragic that the debate is so simple minded. There seems little point in debating whether or not NASA should continue to spend money on manned spaceflight–that seems to be inevitable, for reasons of inertia, perceived prestige, and (most importantly) pork. So, as Clark points out, if we could accept that as a given, it would be nice to have an intelligent discussion about how NASA spends the money that they seem inevitably to be given. Unfortunately, that debate is driven largely by pork as well.

[Update at 8:50 AM EDT]

Jeff Foust has an article about media reaction over at The Space Review this morning.

[Late afternoon update]

There’s an interesting discussion in comments at this post by Jeff Foust at Space Politics, including comments on the existence of lunar water by Paul Spudis.

The Washington Post has an editorial against the Vision for Space Exploration in general, and Mike Griffin’s implementation plans in particular. As usual, there are unstated assumptions built in:

…we believe that the needs of NASA — and the country — can, at this point, be better served by continuing and expanding robotic exploration.

But what are those needs? They don’t say. They think they know what they are, and assume that everyone agrees with them. But I can’t think of any needs of mine that are met by sending robots to other planets. NASA obviously has some need to do so, because they do so, but clearly that doesn’t satisfy the sum total of their needs either.

Once again, we have clueless pundits making policy pronouncements when we haven’t had a national discussion or debate about what the purpose is of having a national space program and policy. Until that happens, it will continue to be driven by the needs for pork in certain congressional districts.

On 9/27 Tierney’s column in the New York Times (subscription required; the cheapest option is get home delivery and go on permanent vacation hold) again picked up the alt.space agenda of colonization. His advice, “If officials hope to get money for NASA’s new program of manned exploration, I suggest they go to Capitol Hill with a two-word sales pitch: gray goo.”

I second the sentiment that civilization protects and heals itself, but a rich planet can afford a stylish colony just in case the unthinkable happens.

Thomas James investigates and dissects the moonbat space agenda.

[Late morning update]

A commenter asks what a “moonbat” is. Short answer is a leftist idiotarian. Here’s a picture of the subspecies barking moonbat, but google the word and you’ll come up with plenty of examples and more images.

Dan Wiener wants to use space elevators to prevent hurricanes.

And if we could get them to lance volcanoes, Jonah Goldberg would probably get behind the project, too.

…and about a hundred million more to go. Liftport had a successful space elevator climber test.

Thomas McCabe fires a broadside at Bob Zubrin, with an article about the irrelevance of the Martian frontier.