And as long as that remains true, NASA has no hope of getting beyond earth orbit.

If they continue on as you say, that just means commercial companies will go to the Moon and other places by themselves without NASA. It will just take a somewhat longer than it would have with NASA. Those Congress Critters are just throwing away taxpayer money to do nothing via SLS. I and others would prefer to have NASA involved, but in the long run it won’t be necessary and it will suit us just fine either way. We just think the waste of NASA’s funds is a shame.

The commercially based track is dependent-as the ULA report mentioned, on a propellant depot. It may or may not work, so where’s your backup if it doesn’t, hmm? That means you’re back to heavy-lift. Expecting a HLV to appear by itself is naive, you know as well as I do it takes 5-7 years to develop one. And in case you’ve forgotten as well: the tentative flight schedule NASA released last year for SLS is based on a WORST-CASE budget scenario. The age of austerity won’t last forever.

Which leads to the next point: Elon Musk himself admitted this when he announced the attempt to build a reusable first stage for Falcon 9 at an event hosted by the National Press Club and shown on C-SPAN: he admitted not only that the odds of success were about 50-50, but when asked about lobbying, he admitted that he and the other NewSpace firms have about 1/10th the lobbying power of the major firms like Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, ULA, Lockheed-Martin, Aerojet, Rocketdyne, and so on. As long as their lobbying is very effective, as was shown with the fight to get SLS, those advocating commercially available rockets have a tough road ahead. Not to mention that you’d have to throw carrots to congresscritters in communities that are potentially affected by a SLS cancellation to agree: guarantees of new work at existing facilities (Michoud, Stennis, Marshall, among others), second-source suppliers for existing rockets (mentioned in the ULA report that Ron is so fond of), and so on. (Assuming, of course, that the report was an official ULA product, and not employees giving their personal opinions, and not those of the firm)

Josh: as long as the SLS crowd has Congressional support-not to mention that many of those supporting it are on The Hill, it will continue to be funded. You’d need a line-item veto (and a President willing to use it) to kill SLS. Or you elect somebody like Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich to the Presidency. Neither is likely to happen because they’re too extreme.