He makes some good points. At least he makes those points in more than three words.

Spudis is correct.

Interesting timing. The memorial services for Neil Armstrong at the National Cathedral in Washington are scheduled for Thursday, September 13. The hearing contents will most-likely be bigfooted by residulal refernces to the content and coverage of Neil’s memorial.

Perhaps of some relevance to this thread that I’d like to point out is the Senate Commerce Hearing “From LEO to Mars”, which will be webcast live on Wednesday September 12 at 2pm EDT. To the extent that the CEO of one of the CCiCAP partners has grand ambitions to send humans to Mars …

joe wrote @ September 8th, 2012 at 7:00 pm

“Actually the “Air & Space hosts” refused to let Dr. Spudis control the discourse on his website due to complaints by people who post regularly on this board.”

I know I was one of them, but according to my records the last time I talked with an Air & Space editor was back in June 2011. My complaint to them was that as a subscriber to Air & Space I was not being allowed to post comments on one of their blogs. At that time Paul had unilaterally banned me from making any comments, and after that I was allowed to post again, although every once in a while my posts would be “accidentally deleted” and I’d have to repost them.

Not that it’s apple-to-apples, let’s compare Paul’s ‘Once and Future Moon’ blog with this one (Space Politics).

– Paul’s blog is part of Air & Space magazine, whereas Space Politics is, according to Jeff, “a personal project of Jeff Foust”.

– Paul posts opinion pieces, whereas Jeff posts topics of discussion.

– Paul not only defends his opinions, but he also critiques the opinions of others. Jeff rarely posts, but other than reminding people to stay on topic, does not critique what people post.

Now I’m sure Air & Space saw some value to having an American geologist and lunar scientist contribute to their magazine, and I’m also sure that my lone complaint more than a year ago was not responsible for A & S taking over comment control from Paul.

All I can say is that Paul’s opinions generate a lot of discussion – certainly when you say that COTS/CRS is an example of oligarchical corporatism, or that Boeing, Orbital Sciences and Sierra Nevada Corp are “companies founded by internet billionaires who have spoken much and often about lofty space plans, but have actually flown in space very little” – you’re going to get competing opinions. Then when you get Paul arguing with the dissenters, that doesn’t look good for A & S, so I guess it’s no surprise they took away control from him. I wonder how much longer he’ll be doing the blog?

In the meantime, Space Politics continues to be a great source of information and discussion…

Paul is angry and that and almost nothing else has blinded him to the realities of the world situation regarding space politics and policy…it is the same affliction which is slowly dragging the GOP down to defeat in the Nov Pres race.

The blog is almost fact free…Spudis does the party line of confusing subsidies with paid for service programs…but thats typical of the right wing now…they simply cant see (with some exceptions) reality in their hatred for Obama…

But aside from the mistakes he makes almost all the time Spudis makes two that are simply glaring.

The first is that he cannot come to grips with the notion that Apollo was a fluke that NASA and space policy people have been trying to recreate for decades now.

The second and most important for this blog is this line ” The Augustine Committee received presentations with options to reconfigure Constellation whereby America could have returned to the Moon (to learn how to use resources found in space) under the existing budgetary cap, but they elected to start from first principles.”

there is really no program that NASA and the “legacy” contractors could get their hands on, that would not roll over budget and shift out of schedule. Spudis cannot figure out that NASA is functionally brain dead; that they would take a 10 dollar effort and turn it into a 100 or a 1000…as the SLS program (not to mention Orion) must illustrate. It is hard to imagine why Orion is costing so much until you grasp teh fact that almost every project NASA does has an inability to be managed outside the traditional NASA portfolio of clutzs.

There are political reasons a return to the Moon or a trip to (insert place here) is not sustainable…but the main one is that no real decision maker has any real belief that NASA could do anything even close to time and within 50 percent of budget…

Paul that’s why you are angry. RGO