“Space X has flown nobody.”

As you’ve been schooled about previously, they haven’t tried, so it’s pretty nonsensical to say that.

However today, at a NASA briefing for the Commercial Crew program, SpaceX said they are targeting their first test flights with crew in 2015.

What a crow eating-fest for you that will be…

If you hadn’t been told the truth before and you said that statement, you would not be lying. I have given you the benefit of the doubt before now and not blatantly come out and said you were lying. But there is no way anyone can say you haven’t been told the truth at this point. So I am going to call you on this lie everytime you say it.

I had this very faint hope that I might be able to get Chris to go beyond his ingrained prejudice long enough to see that his idea that we are going to be restricted to LEO is false. I was just trying to give him one last benefit of the doubt.

Even after we go beyond LEO again, he will say that it could have been done practically and sooner some other way. That will be the case even when we return to the Moon (which we will, with or without NASA). In working towards the capability to go to Mars, we will automatically (long before we go to Mars) be able to return to the Moon because the capabilities required for a lunar return are a small subset of what is needed to go to Mars.

Chris seems to think Elon is bullshitting when he says his primary goal is Mars. He is a truly hopeless fanatic. I totally give up on trying to reason with him.

“Commercial Crew is NOT the new Gemini!”

Commercial is not like government? Reusable is not like expendable? Operational is not like test?

Wow, what insight.

This may of news to you Chris, but Commercial Crew is going to be like Commercial Crew, which means dramatically lowering the cost to access space. It is also the permanent transfer of responsibility for what used to take a country to afford and do, and make it the responsibility of companies.

It should have happened a decade ago, but at least it’s finally coming.

“If a big space project has come along enough, in terms of progress, usually a new president “cannot” terminate it.”

Finally, some level of understanding for how things work.

Yes, if the Constellation program would have been on schedule, and on budget, no one would have questioned it.

But it wasn’t Chris. It was horribly behind schedule, and massively over budget. That is why a bi-partisan Congress agreed – WITHOUT DEBATE – to cancel it when requested by Obama. Congress could have ignored Obama, and either Republicans or Democrats in the Senate could have filibustered the legislation to kill the program, but Congress agreed. Let me repeat – CONGRESS AGREED that the Constellation program needed to be killed.

So let that be a lesson for you. If you can’t propose a program architecture that will stay on schedule and budget, and if you can’t staff the program with good enough program managers that can solve problems within schedule and budget, then your little lunar dreams will never happen. NEVER!

That’s why many of us support the goals of the companies trying to lower the costs to access space, because that frees up money that will be needed for the other hardware that will inevitably go over schedule and budget. So what SpaceX is doing is making it easier for your lunar dreams to come true, as is the work being done on the ISS to solve the problems relating to living and working in space.

Too bad you can’t understand that….

“Did I mistake you for one of the anti-Moon Mars zealots?”

Chris, you confuse the lack of enthusiasm for spending gobs and gobs of money without any real need for being against going to the Moon or Mars.

I would love to go to the Moon and Mars, but I don’t see the value in spending $100-200B of my taxpayer money just so a couple of “chosen ones” can spend a week or two on the Moon picking up rocks.

If we’re going to go back to the Moon, it should be to stay – to establish a permanent presence, just like we have in LEO. However we don’t have the knowledge or technology to do that in a sustainable fashion yet, so going back prematurely is just wasting money, something we don’t have any to waste.

So the bigger question is, why do you want to waste money? Do you have stock in Boeing or Lockheed Martin, or some other company that would benefit from large government contracts?

The Moon has been there for billions of years, and it will keep waiting for us as long as it takes for us to be ready to go back, but we’re not ready now, and there is no urgency to going back.

Take a chill pill…