As for NASA public outreach. What is happening in the agency to inspire anyone?

People keep blathering how “presidential leadership” is needed here to ensure the future of human spaceflight. Well, even if there were implicit presidential statements about the importance for settlement, which I argue is a faulty interpretation of stated policy, no one in Congress has built on those implicit statements. This is a stool you’d have, standing on one implicit leg.

You’re just imagining things, and imagination doesn’t make policy.

“But right now for the time being I’ve been seeing SpaceX advertised prices increase, rather than decrease, within individual product lines.”

The SpaceX Falcon 9 is advertised today for $54M, but for a long time previously it used to be priced at $59.5M.

You don’t know what you are talking about.

Just as soon as the commercial space flight era produces a revolution and some competition I’ll get back to you with some actual numbers. But right now for the time being I’ve been seeing SpaceX advertised prices increase, rather than decrease, within individual product lines.

I chalk it up to development, which will be ongoing for a while now.

We shall see.

“In fact, actually, if one wants to establish a ‘multi-planet species’, to avoid the remake of “Dino-Smackdown” but with human actors, then the Moon (despite it not being a ‘planet’) is just as good a life boat as Mars.”

Well, except it has half the gravity, no atmosphere at all, and it’s so close to Earth that a “Dino-Smackdown” here on Earth could affect everyone that’s on the Moon.

If the goal is to be multi-planetary, then going far away from Earth is the better choice. And that would be Mars.

“I agree we’re ‘seeing’ lower prices, I posit they’re just not here yet.”

Where is “here”?

“We have a full cost accounting for Apollo and STS, prices were falling for a while, now they are rising again.”

Maybe the problem here is that you are measuring apples, mangoes and oranges, and I’m measuring just apples.

STS did in fact “launch” non-STS payloads, but Apollo was dedicated to just it’s own hardware – I don’t consider that comparable.

“Better even than CRS…”

CRS is primarily delivering pressurized cargo – you can only compare that to the Shuttle when it was carrying the MPLM. And because the Shuttle was multi-purpose, it’s a little hard to isolate just the pressurized cargo costs.

“…but CRS is only a temporary glitch as it directly incorporates the cost of development, as well it should.”

Then apparently it’s not a “glitch”. And in any case, since there has only been one CRS contract series, there is no way to make a comparison – it is what it is. And for the CRS contract, it is costing NASA $3.5B for 40mt of pressurized cargo. That works out to $87,500/kg. I expect that will fall on the next series, especially if NASA allows SpaceX to reuse their existing fleet of Dragon spacecraft.

If the Shuttle had done just a cargo run to the ISS, and we used the $1.2B historic average cost that doesn’t include DDT&E, then that would have worked out to $133,333/kg if the Shuttle delivered 9mt in the MPLM.

That’s my math, let’s see yours.

I think Jeff Greason is right – we do have national agreement about the goal, although it should be more explicit.