As to national security, DOD has decided that human spaceflight isn’t an effective way to carry out their mission. The last military Shuttle mission involved such thinks as having crewmen looking through binoculars to find ships on the Earth that their eyes might supposedly be better at than electronic imaging. Not exactly practical. DOD satellites (GPS, Comm, recon, weather) are unmanned and operated by DOD. All missiles are ground-based, and Heinlein notwithstanding, there’s no indication we need any space-based weapons. NASA no longer has defense responsibilities.

I certainly don’t oppose government involvement, in commercial and scientific spaceflight but in reality Falcon Orion, and Shuttle are all built by private contractors working on NASA contracts. The fight is really just between different contractors and different NASA program managers.

I think the argument about NASA vs private is meaningless. I’ve been in hundreds of NASA safety meetings. Everybody wants to be safe, but I have seen no evidence in the past twenty years that NASA knows more about safety than USA, ULA, or SpaceX.

How everyone has jumped (been pushed) into this pit of division is stunning.

Division, political posturing, simmering scores to settle, finger pointing, back stabbing, haughty claims and down right meanness is the product of this administration’s new direction. (I am not directing that list toward you).

It isn’t either one or the other, it’s commercial and government programs, just as the VSE had outlined. The government is responsible for our space assets and our national security. We can’t just off load that HUGE responsibility with our fingers crossed in the hopeful belief that things will just fall into place.

A favorite talking point on blogs is that conservatives don’t like spending public funds, so what’s up with conservatives now demanding NASA funding???

Well, that is obvious to anyone who isn’t trying to gain political points. Our national security and the protection of our commercial and military space assets ARE the government’s job and WHAT they are supposed to spend money on (unlike many other areas of huge expenditure).

It is cheap access to space (unfortunately that went out with the chosen architecture called Constellation) along with ISRU. The VSE, coupled with the appropriate architecture, is still the correct direction.

It will come together on the Moon, when and if everyone stops squabbling.

ISRU can’t begin to pay off because ELVs are much too expensive to build the massive infrastructure needed on the Moon. With CRATS the cost of putting people in space will be lowered by a factor of ten. That will make it possible for people to do work in space that is actually worth the cost of putting them there, and to put tourists in space in substantial numbers for a price they are willing to pay.

If we don’t learn how to use the resources in space DCSCA, we (humans) will not explore very far or for very long. As we moved west we certainly didn’t carry everything on our backs or depend only on what would fit in a wagon or on horseback. As we make space ours, we will do so by learning to live off the land.

Resource exploitation enables human exploration, if you will.

If you only want robots and scientific musings, then you might not care about things like, creating a system whereby all can participate.

Space exploitation is not space exploration.

The VSE recognized that the Moon was the logical main objective, with Mars and beyond to follow once we had begun using space resources (commercial was included in the VSE since the idea was to make resource utilization an enabling prod to routinely get beyond LEO). However, as we all know, it was ignored and instead referred to as a Mars mission, which suited those running the agency.

Unfortunately for all of us, the chosen architecture ate the buffet then started consuming the tables and chairs and cried out for more. Stubbornly, instead of going with an affordable plan, the administrator bet the future of U.S. space exploration on his belief that he knew best and that Congress would not let the U.S. space program fail. However, the perfect storm blew in and he lost that bet, and with it the hopes and livelihoods of thousands.

Early on and repeatedly, sane alternatives and rational, affordable methods were offered — all were turned away at the administrator’s door. This was his decision and his failure and it has impacted our entire nation.

The VSE was about taking us somewhere, despite your claim otherwise. It was to learn how to use resources in space, starting on the Moon. Doing this on the Moon is the only sensible beginning to our move into space. How you can blithely say that, it was never supposed to take us anywhere, is beyond my comprehension. Have you read the VSE from cover to cover?

So, again we will do the odd (but expensive) parlor trick to entertain, instead of doing the hard work of getting people into space. To paraphrase you, it is a program that has no value and no meaning. But of course it is executable because it has no direction, no wrong answers, no work product, no nothing (unless, of course, you consider the elimination of the U.S. manned space program a good thing).

Clearly, the future of manned space exploration as viewed by those presently calling the shots is NOT like the VSE. How you can make the stretch so as to imagine this new “direction” as possibly “pertaining” to the VSE is nonsensical to me. By ignoring the Moon as THE objective, the VSE is killed. Now that is a different statement than saying Constellation is dead.

There will be no “pay dirt” until we exploit the resources of the Moon.

It’s actually not clear that the VSE doesn’t still pertain. That document was a very general one, and was pointing in all the right directions. It could well have been aimed at economic pay dirt. (I’m reluctant to say it was taking us there. VSE was never supposed to be “taking” anyone anywhere.) But what we’re talking about is Constellation as an implementation strategy for VSE. Properly funded, it might well have taken us to economic pay dirt. But it wasn’t properly funded and, it seems, couldn’t be properly funded. It was, for this reason, considered unexecutable. The new implementation plan is not inconsistent with VSE, though it’s probably going to take us longer to get to “economic pay dirt” than a properly funded Constellation program would.

But how is that relevant to anything? Reverence for a program that was unexecutable has no value and no meaning. It’s a false god.

I think I will close with some sage words you may recognize – you posted them in the post immediately following mine:

“I see you are easily impressed with what things were suppose (sic) to do or at best said they were going to do, and dont care so much as to how things ended up.”

Oler, no matter whether Bush lied or was mistaken, no matter whether the WMD went to Syria or never existed, no matter the terrible pain of the past 8 or so years, the bald fact is that 25 million (give or take) Iraqis are free to decide their fate. ”

that is always the last justification of the folks still cheering the reasons for the Iraq war.

Aggression is aggression no matter what explanations are used for it. The Japanese tried that in the leadup to WW2. They were going to free all the colored people of Asia from White European colonialism and then protect them in the “co prosperity sphere”. When we finally put their aggression down we hung every last sob that made that argument.

If every nation has the right to go “free” people who they view as oppressed then we have reverted to the justification that OBL used for 9/11 just in our culture frame. I happen to like our culture, but that does not give us carte blanche to go rogue around the world beating up on regimes that might be horrific but do not threaten us.

In the end you are correct that the Iraqis have been given a priceless chance to change their future. What they make of it is what they make of it and we have to hope that it is something that is good for a future America.

But this one must live with the notion that after 9/11 we listened to a man and his administration that told lies, exaggerated and then bungled an invasion of a country that posed no threat to us. About 200K Iraqis who had no dogs in the fight paid for the privilege of the future to be free…as did 4000 Americans.

A lie remains a lie. And because brave and resourceful people (the US military and some Iraqis) made it work out, brings honor to them, not to the people who told the lie. Or people like you who keep defending it.

Robert G. Oler

I see you are easily impressed with what things were suppose to do or at best said they were going to do, and dont care so much as to how things ended up.

Not me.

Robert G. Oler