I’m not for it. Not unless they start spending the money a lot smarter. Constellation shouldn’t have been funded even if NASA had ten times the budget.

It is vastly different. It is much more affordable, much more reliable, and was designed from the start to carry crew. It’s not a converted ICBM.

And with all the accumulated wisdom and improvements of long service and an impressive record it is vastly more reliable than the old Atlas ICBM it is ultimately based on and that Glenn flew on.

That’s obvious.

This writer suggests, for a start, you revisit the archives of the broadcast networks — or the Congressional Record over the past 30 or 40 years for ‘citations’ by astronaut/Senator Glenn regarding his consistent comments on the premise of ‘basic fundamental research’ with respect to manned spaceflight. Glenn’s comments on safety considerations are no different from those of Armstrong or Cernan. As Cernan said, private rocketeers ‘don’t know what they don’t know yet.’

So we look at the budget, and like adults, determine the best way to achieve our goals. That way is reducing costs to LEO and building our technology base. That way we can do more with what little we got.

I agree NASA is inefficient. I’m still curious about your point of view on valuation: when you wrote “Look the conversation about HSF exploration would be quite different IF … the cost to do human exploration of space were an order or two of magnitude cheaper then what it is,” were you suggesting that human exploration of space *is* worthwhile if it costs say, 0.02 % of the federal budget, but *not* worthwhile if it costs 0.2% ??