Why?

Today I announce a new plan to explore space and extend a human presence across our solar system. We will begin the effort quickly, using existing programs and personnel. We’ll make steady progress — one mission, one voyage, one landing at a time.

Our first goal is to complete the International Space Station by 2010.

The declaration comes directly from Bush.

I also agree that the ISS is an arbitrary obligation, and so is its completion. And I agree that it is a mistake to lard real exploration with this dying albatross. But again, it’s not my mistake, it’s in the VSE.

But to give Bush some major credit, he and Griffin do seem resolved to cut the albatross loose in 2010.

As usual, your choice of words (“…deterioration…”) makes unwarranted assumptions and deliberately casts your argument in an equally unwarranted favoring light.

You seem to believe that the success of an effort like ISS should be measured by the degree to which all participants meet all of their original objectives. That’s nonsense. Huge projects with timelines measured in decades are bound to have shifting objectives. Stuff happens and people adjust. There’s no moral or ethical component here (altough your condemnation of NASA and Bush implicitly rest on such on assumption). The ISS is a political creation and a political creature. It will be “completed” when the politicians responsible for it say it is completed. The U.S., in particular, should not hamstring the real exploration and exploitation of space simply to fulfill an imaginary obligation.

Finally, when you describe the completion of ISS as the initial component of VSE, your engaging in sophistry. ISS plays no real role in the enabling of the VSE.

As international cooperation goes, the space station is the ultimate dysfunctional marriage in which divorce would be a humiliating admission of failure. At a personal level, it happens all the time.

As you know, I am no friend of the Bush Administration, but your statement here is wildly unfair. At the time it was made, completing the Space Station seemed an achievable goal. It may still be, albeit with major modification. It was also the responsible thing to do. As an all-too-rare example of truly cooperating on an international problem, this decision should be praised, not criticized.

— Donald

How so? There are a lot of smart people working on how ISS can be completed in a number of different ways. It may yet fall apart, but you’ve got your “Bush failed/lied” cheering section started a bit soon on that count.

But at any rate, you stated that the VSE speech was full of “unrealistic statements” as written. In the case of ISS completion for that to be true the speechwriter and speech giver would have to have known at the time of the speech that completing ISS was impossible. No one knew that to be true then, we don’t even know that to be true now.

Now if changing circumstances (foam CAN”T be fixed etc.) makes it impossible to complete the ISS, that still does not mean the speech was written purposefully with things in it that could not come to be. It only means that unforeseen circumstances prevented that from being done.