You can consider anything to be an “entitlement” when the nation is broke. But that’s not what everyone else considers it. I can consider a rocket launcher to be a popsicle, even though everyone else doesn’t. If you want to invent your own words, please do it in your Kindergarten classroom.

You can cling to your word inventions if you wish. But don’t bother the rest of us with them.

NASA is not usually a partisan issue, and Constellation was one messed up program.

Opposition to commercial crew is not partisan either*. It’s a pork issue, something near and dear to members of both parties.

*with the possible exception of one or two commenters here.

We’ve had an election here on ObamaCare. Twice. It lost by a 2-1 margin each time.

In addition, 1 million people marched on the Washington Mall to try to prevent its passage.

Massachusetts elected a Republican to Ted Kennedy’s seat to be the 40th vote against ObamaCare.

28 states sued the federal government to try to prevent its implementation.

ObamaCare is probably the most unpopular law since the Fugitive Slave Act.

If you like it, fine, but you have no right to impose it on the rest of us.

But let’s put ObamaCare aside for a moment. About 95% of federal spending — including NASA (to be on topic) — is acceptable to both sides. So they could pass that 95% and then compromise on the remaining 5%. They could, except the Senate and the White House have said “No deal.” They either get 100% of what they want, or no one gets anything.

The shutdown would end tomorrow if the Senate and the president were willing to compromise.

It is well known that the military slice of the pie is roughly equal to Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, Discretionary, and Other. They are equal slices of the pie, so to claim that ‘entitlements’, whatever that is, represents something really bad or extra special compared to ‘Military’ is nonsense. You can continue to cling to your delusions and vanity if you wish.

Oh, and let’s not forget that Ares I was being built to send crew to ISS — but would be funded by deorbiting ISS, therefore Ares I had no place to go and served no purpose.

Clearly a program designed by a dysfunctional Congress. Obama deserved re-election just for proposing to kill Constellation. Congress morphed it into SLS to protect their pork, but technically speaking no President can “kill” a program. Only Congress can do that.

Seems like if MAVEN didn’t launch, and you needed to park the Mars rovers because MRO and Odyssey failed, that wouldn’t obligate new money. But it’s possible that if this work isn’t done, then additional effort in FY2014 might be necessary to achieve MAVEN launch readiness. Can anyone provide some illumination here?

This is just the early indications that the SLS was never really needed, and that Congress has no intention of providing NASA enough money to use the SLS. The tipping point for the SLS program is probably not too far off.

“My only real regret about Constellation was that it was partially reborn as “SLS”.”

True. But as I recall the sentiment back then on Space Politics, overall we all thought that what happened was a win for Obama, a win for NASA, and a win for the commercial space industry.

I will admit that it’s taken longer to cancel the SLS than I thought (or hoped), but since Congress has refused so far to fund any use for the SLS, it’s only a matter of time.

“If we want a super heavy-lifter right now we should put one out for bid to the private sector and see what kind of prices they quote us.”

Agreed. Which is why the SLS is so completely backward, because no one knows what the actual need is, so they are building a transportation system without any guidance from the “market” it’s supposed to serve. In the real world, companies that attempt to do that usually fail miserably, and I’ve seen nothing that indicates it won’t happen for this government effort.