SpaceX and other entrepreneurs will leave the SLS in the dust as they should.

The aerospace lobbyists and political hack in Congress need to get on the right side of history and embrace change, not work to undermine it for selfish, short-sighted reasons.

“The Iraqi’s are enduring our freedom!”

No, they are finally able to have their freedom from Bush’s warrantless invasion.

And this year he’s testing a modified version of the capsule with escape motors.

“Assuming we are speaking about a jobs programs and keeping in the spirit of congressional intent for legacy STS and Apollo hardware and JSC/KSC/MSFC/Michoud?Stennis involvement, then I’m leaning toward ten meter solutions with SRBs and liquid hydrocarbon booster augmentation and possibly some kind of modified deep throttlable J2-XS with the idle mode landing.”

Sometimes it just seems like you want to write something in a public forum, so you just happen to choose Space Politics, but otherwise it really doesn’t matter since it’s just an urge to write, not to engage in conversation or discussion.

“You can also run the center engine right up to the end of lunar terminal landing and then land horizontally using distributed hypergolics…”

ULA proposes a similar arrangement for their proposed space and lunar transportation architecture, but theirs uses existing launchers and tooling, while you are off proposing an even larger version of an unsustainable transportation system. I wonder which one is more doable?

“The proposal is on NSPIRES if you wish to review it.”

I’m not familiar with NSPIRES, but when Iooked I found a solicitation for “NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts” (Solicitation: NNH13ZUA001N). Is that what you are submitting your proposal to?

The proposal is on NSPIRES if you wish to review it.

“But most of all, why would you spend a billion bucks to put 70 or 400 tons into orbit?”

That is the question. As of now, the only new program being worked on is the Obama plan to send a crew to an asteroid in 2025, but it does not have money from Congress, so it’s just initial planning only at this point.

“There is no rational economic justification.”

Well to be fair, the goal of government spending is not necessarily because there is an economic justification. For instance, the DoD and NPS are not funded because there is an economic justification for waging war, or for keeping forests free of development.

“And what about all the science on the $100 billion dollar space station – nothing for the money that you could not have done on earth for 1/10,000th the cost.”

I don’t think you know anything about what is happening on the ISS. Have you even looked at the list of experiments that have been done on the ISS, or that are planned? You can’t do long term zero-g experiments in a 1g environment.

For instance, scientists are just now learning how to keep humans healthy while they are in zero-g for six month periods of time, and the ISS partners are planning to test the same techniques on two astronauts that stay in space for one year.

If your goal is to learn how to live and work in space, then the only way to do that is to live and work in space. Earth is not a substitute.