As long as you delude yourself that human spaceflight has anything to do with science at all, let alone space science, you’ll continue to misunderstand and misdiagnose the problem.

But before we do anything we need a “car” to visit the lakes. That is what this program gives us opportunity to create. So before we talk about bringing along the boat (landing craft) lets just worry about building the vehicle we need to take us to ANY lake we want to go…. FIRST. We can fish from the bank, so to speak, with teleoperated probes, in real time, from orbit. Until we get the systems wrung out we can visit a lot of points in space and will be in a better posiition to bring commercial activities with us as we go.

NASA development and advancement in space is NOT about subscribing to Rep/Dem duopolistic politics-full stop.

When NASA commits to a program-of-record in whatever administration it was conceived it goes through project management ie. the PROJECT LIFE CYCLE. For me space science has nothing to do with who is in the executive. Each president sells his/her party’s version of space development the rub is when programs-of-record are completely gutted and trashed at a moment’s notice throwing good money after bad to satisfy the demise of a otherwise good program. I can understand some modifications to an existing program-of-record not violently dropping the program.

“Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-MD), chair of the subcommittee and the only Democratic senator present at the hearing, said she was not yet sold on the new exploration plan.”

If you listen to the hearing at the lady senator’s tone she was not too pleased at these program-of-record drops. And you can bet she will pursue this criticism with others in her party as with other members’ party on the committee. 90% of the members where super concerned about the new NASA plan.

If you can’t see the the space policy feathers flying in the background then you need to cop-a-clue ’cause there’s some serious debate going in NASA space policy right now!!

I actually doubt the new space proposal would result in visiting Mars with astronauts before visiting the Moon (“establishing” might be more debatable). The new effort is geared towards enabling exploration in general over the next few years, not one particular destination. It attempts to develop generally useful technologies like propellant depots, closed-loop life support, and others, and to develop commercial space capabilities, so that all sorts of destinations can be reached later. It doesn’t really favor Mars before the Moon. The real decisions about what destinations to go for will happen in later years under this approach, and that will depend on results from technology development, commercial and international partnerships, and robotic precursors, as well as future priorities.

Note that the 2011 budget’s first HSF robotic precursor mission will, according to the budget proposal document, probably be a mission to the lunar surface to test telerobotics and look for resources, which implies an interest in use of those resources. There are also suggestions in the budget about lunar ISRU.

As far as current Administration efforts tend towards a particular sequence of missions, they follow the Augustine Committee Flexible Path to Mars pretty closely, and that path strongly hints at visits to the Moon’s surface before Mars’ surface. The President says we wouldn’t visit the Moon first, but the Flexible Path allows (and probably encourages) visits to the Moon’s surface after visiting NEOs or Mars orbit/Mars Moons.

“For now, I think the President space strategy is a bit blurry and could benefit from more PR time. His administration have not communicated it in the best way.”

A lot of times you see a reoccuring theme in space forums. The idea that NASA is great at power point presentations and pushing paper rather than executing the actual creation. This is one time, with our modern media systems, the President should have used them. I would have prefered him giving his speech in front of a jumbo tron screen with vasimr powered, inflatable hab crew quarters ships flying across the screen illustrating how is plan is to operate.

For space, a picture does indeed say a thousand words and I believe, with his ability to supply a narrative to the streaming images people would have been more open to what he was suggesting.

[The space program] should have more to do with that than it currrently does.

This is an annoyance of mine. People really need to go read NASA’s charter to see what it is that NASA is supposed to do:

http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html

NASA got hijacked into the Cold War vision of beating the Russians to the Moon. Ever since then, it’s been a political battle to return to its original intent.

And right up front it says:

The Congress declares that the general welfare of the United States requires that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (as established by title II of this Act) seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space. (Emphasis added.)