A preposterously irrational belief. Based on faith in the astronaut cult and its dopmaine rush, but at least an order of magnitude divorced from economic reality.

Either that, or based on the lie of calling 99.5% taxpayer-funded activities “commerce”.

Not for me, I don’t think manned spaceflight today is the primary thing we need. It might still work though, if done right, and NASA shows no sign of adopting the approach I believe could lead to substantial commercial manned spaceflight in our lifetime, not just that of our grandchildren.

The current pork laden system works against lowering costs. It seeks to maintain as much employment in certain districts as possible regardless of success of the program. This is at odds with every advance in human technology. Generally we figure out how to do things with fewer people over time (i.e. the shuttle control room vs. Space X control room) or we figure out how do something better with the same amount of people.

Now the cost savings don’t have to come quickly. For instance paper was very expensive until new methods of production were invented in the 20th century, Machines and other devices to wash clothes for instance have been around since the 17th century, but it wasn’t till the 20ies that they start to become practical for the home. What needs to happen is that some method of choosing the cheaper or better system needs to exist so that technology advances.

That is why there was so little support for CXP. Sure you can build a moon base, but at what cost? In short CXP would have given humanity LESS spaceflight experience than we currently have now. It degraded from lunar base to 2, 2 week missions to the moon for just 4 people. Right now there are 6 people on the ISS who can stay there for months.

Right now I think it is possible for some future President to say have a goal to land people on the moon and have a much better chance of the program costing a lot less than CXP and being more sustainable than Apollo. You could use Dragon (much cheaper than Orion) and Falcon Heavy. NASA only needs to come up with EDS and lander. This is much cheaper than CXP where NASA has to build Capsule, rocket, and Lander with no other programs or organizations to share some costs with.

Gingrich is interested in space, but not programs like CXP. In the 90ies, he stated he would have stopped the moon landings after the first! He is very much pro-commercail, frankly more pro-commercail than Obama, or most of the posters here including me. He does want to settle the moon, but like me he does not see CXP as the template to do it with.

If you settle the moon, the old NASA paragon is a no starter. CXP would have only landed the chosen few on the moon. It would not be like say Soyuz or CCREW where anyone in theory could pay for it if they have the money. Right now trips into LEO much less to the moon are expensive very expensive but that does not have to be the case forever. CXP did little to address the cost factor. Commercial space at least attempts to address this problem. I mean let’s say in ten years someone figures out how to lower the price of cargo to LEO by say 20 million. They could in theory win a contract to send cargo to the ISS or a new spacestation. They could even raise some capital via private markets to aid with the development.

However if CXP is anything like the shuttle you would still mostly be using the same parts and technology ten years later. Little to no possibility of cost savings.

“Newt’s biggest failure the night of that debate was to remind Romney (and their audience) that up until Constellation was abandoned, a lunar “base” HAD been NASA’s goal — a goal that had been proposed by the Bush White House and approved by Congress (twice).”

Congress was going to approve anything that kept the money flowing to the old shuttle contractors. Note how well the OSP project did when they mentioned using the EELV to launch it. Bush would never have decided to go to the moon, if Columbia had not fallen in pieces to the ground. He just wanted a bold goal, but he was not as interested in the feasibility of said goal on a NASA budget that did not increase dramatically. Bush and even worse Griffon was somewhat anti-ISS….which having spent so much money and time putting it together, no one was going to dump a working space station into the ocean after five years. It is one thing to end the Apollo program(basically Apollo was ended by NASA running out of rockets/capsule).

Pre Bush there were lunar plans that included the ISS. After Bush’s failed attempt to gather large amounts of international support for gulf war II, the ISS suddenly became something to be gotten out of as soon as possible. A sign that the US no longered cared about the rest of the planet. Congress also was not too crazy about that idea.

However if CXP is anything like the shuttle you would still mostly be using the same parts and technology ten years later. Little to no possibility of cost savings.
“Newt’s biggest failure the night of that debate was to remind Romney (and their audience) that up until Constellation was abandoned, a lunar “base” HAD been NASA’s goal — a goal that had been proposed by the Bush White House and approved by Congress (twice).”
Congress was going to approve anything that kept the money flowing to the old shuttle contractors. Note how well the OSP project did when they mentioned using the EELV to launch it. Bush would never have decided to go to the moon, if Columbia had not fallen in pieces to the ground. He just wanted a bold goal, but he was not as interested in the feasibility of said goal on a NASA budget that did not increase dramatically. Bush and even worse Griffon was somewhat anti-ISS….which having spent so much money and time putting it together, no one was going to dump a working space station into the ocean after five years. It is one thing to end the Apollo program(basically Apollo was ended by NASA running out of rockets/capsule).

Pre Bush there were lunar plans that included the ISS. After Bush’s failed attempt to gather large amounts of international support for gulf war II, the ISS suddenly became something to be gotten out of as soon as possible. A sign that the US no longered cared about the rest of the planet. Congress also was not too crazy about that idea.

“This is the voodoo doll theory of space settlement.”

You used to be (at least on some low level) entertaining, even though what you wrote was at best (literally, at best) semi-incoherent…

“Space colonization is our grachildren’s task, or their grandchidren’s. ”

… but apparently you feel space is “too hard”, and we should not even try to do anything in space with humans. I beg to differ.

We don’t lack the will or the ability to leave LEO, we lack the money. That is why I am excited by the ability of SpaceX to significantly lower the cost to get mass to orbit and to resupply LEO stations. Countries, companies and people will react to this reduction in cost, and then the next innovator will figure out a way to lower the costs even more.

Our children and grandchildren will benefit from the efforts we have made to lower costs, and they will have a much better starting point than our generation had. That’s the legacy we need to leave them – not that “it was too hard for us, so we left it all for you”.

Don’t be a wimp.

That’s fair. But in Newt’s mind, colonization and settlement were, in the historical exploration tradition, of self evident value. He just never bothered to explain that to anyone. He’s a “historian”, you’ll remember. As in, if it’s good enough for the Pilgrims, it’s good enough for us!

The price tag is irrelevant. Or at least it’s relevant only to the expressed goal. To the extent that colonization and settlement of the Moon is hardly considered a national need, just about any expenditure to do it is somewhat insane.

But I’ll say again that by focusing on colonization and settlement, at least Newt tried (inarticulately, as it turns out) to reach for a real national goal that was far more enabling of the spirit of exploration than “human space flight” or “jobs, jobs, and more jobs”. What he learned was that the nation isn’t ready to accept that as a national goal.

Newt’s biggest failure the night of that debate was to remind Romney (and their audience) that up until Constellation was abandoned, a lunar “base” HAD been NASA’s goal — a goal that had been proposed by the Bush White House and approved by Congress (twice).

Had Gingrich mentioned that simple fact, he might have avoided becoming a laughing stock on Saturday Night Live. But Newt’s ego might have gotten in the way. Rather than acknowledging that a lunar base had been the policy of the Bush Administration, it seems Gingrich wanted to make it look like another one of his “big” ideas. He could have made Romney look like a dunce had he simply said, “This isn’t my idea, Governor. This was national policy up until the time that the Obama Administration cancelled it. If you knew anything about the space program, you would have known that. But you’re obviously ill informed about America’s highly important aerospace industry.” And he might have asked Romney, “Governor, would you have ‘fired’ George W. Bush and the Congressional leaders who supported him for setting a return to the Moon and the establishment of a permanent lunar base as a national goal? Do you know anything about our space program?”

Unfortunately, Gingrich just stood there. And he failed to cite the Constellation Program in every subsequent comment on the topic. In so doing, he made space exploration a subject for ridicule.

“Open mouth, insert foot” seems to be Newt’s modus operandi. That was one of his greatest liabilities in the primary battles, as well as during his tenure as Speaker of the House. A smart man. But not smart enough to think twice before shooting his mouth off.

Space colonization is our grachildren’s task, or their grandchidren’s. Promoting it as a national goal in our lifetimes makes about as much sense as promoting an astronaut trip to Eris, sending a Curiosity type rover to one of the newly disccovered almost-earthlike exoplanets, or any other such goal that is many orders of magnitude away from economic feasibility for us, but may be possible for our granchidlren.

The basic problem the HSF cult has here is that it’s actually quite easy for most people to recognize and dismiss their crackpottery.

I agree, reading a lot of general news blogs at that time, the most common slam against it was the 500 billion to 1 trillion commenters said it was going to cost the taxpayer.

I thought it was a big mistake that all he did was talk about how it could be done at a lower cost (prizes et cetera) then didn’t give the actual price tag on some of the options. It could have, at the very least, provided his supports some ammunition to counter the 1 trillion dollar posts, instead he handed them an empty gun.