Do people who argue for SLS + Orion as a backup for commercial crew want to see EELV / Falcon + commercial crew as a backup for SLS + Orion? If not, what does that suggest about their real motives?

I agree there should be an increase in the Exploration budget. However, as the situation exists in all branches of the federal government, such an increase has the proverbial snowball’s chance in Hell. Given that fact, if we choose “Peter” as the inherently wasteful SLS and “Paul” as Commercial crew, it would be a true service and benefit to the nation as a whole.

The Obama administration has asked Congress for $830 million in fiscal 2013 to fund on-going development of new commercial manned spacecraft to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station. But NASA only got half of what it asked for in 2012, a cut that effectively pushed the first operational launch back one year to 2017, and program officials said Tuesday any similar cuts in 2013 and beyond could push the program to the brink of irrelevance.

If Congress significantly reduces funding for the commercial crew initiative again, if NASA only ends up with $300 million to $400 million per year for the next five years instead of the $800 million or so per year that’s currently envisioned, “I would say it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to do this program,” said Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA headquarters.

“ASAP says that commercial crew is in jeopardy if it continues to be underfunded by Congress.”

Don’t know who “ASAP” is, but the underfunding of Commercial Crew has been discussed at length in the past by CCDev participants and pundits alike. In short, yes the program is in jeopardy if it underfunded too much.

“If Congress short changes it again, when exactly will we return to regular ISS flights?”

Return? We haven’t stopped. Unless you mean when the Shuttle “visited” the ISS for less than two weeks at a time, but that doesn’t really count as much as “staying” like Soyuz does. Without Soyuz, there would be no long-term occupation of the ISS.

However the Soyuz is one system operated by one entity, and that is never a good thing if you want redundancy and an increasing market capability. That is why Commercial Crew is so important, not only for ISS support, but for expanding human activity in space overall.

If Congress short changes it again, when exactly will we return to regular ISS flights?

If they decide to take this from commercial crew, that would reduce the amount in that budget from $829.7 million to $687.2 million. I don’t know how severe a setback that would be for the program.

If Congress for some reason decides to resurrect the ExoMars effort using the same approach, commercial crew is completely screwed over.

The blame isn’t with NASA. It’s with Congress.”

Agreed. Gerst’s response is a symptom, not a cause. The Senate Launch System and Multiple Procured Congressional Votes are sucking all the oxygen out of NASA human space flight.

NASA’s head of human flight can’t even tell us what the exploration destinations are, nevertheless what the plan for accessing them is.

That’s because Congress hasn’t authorized any.

The President has proposed an asteroid rendezvous as a stepping-stone to Mars. Congress has failed to act on that proposal. Congress is only interested in perpetuating jobs in their districts. They don’t care about missions or destinations.

The blame isn’t with NASA. It’s with Congress.

The cuts in planetary science went to JWST, not “groundwork” for “field geologists”, of which there are none in the astronaut corps.

“… laying the groundwork for eventually sending field geologists to Earth’s moon, the Martian moons, Mars, and asteroids (in that order of importance) should be the priority.”

But it’s not the (or a) priority in this budget. No transit stages, landers, rover, or other human surface exploration systems are funded in this budget. In fact, NASA’s head of human flight can’t even tell us what the exploration destinations are, nevertheless what the plan for accessing them is:

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1611

“Over the long term, that is the way we will get the best scientific answers with the most efficient investment of resources.”

An overly generic and unsupportable statement. It depends on what questions the planetary decadal surveys are asking in any particular decade.