I would very much like to see some analysis of what population it takes to REALLY preserve a species. There must be a lot of work on that by conservation biologists. I suspect that eight isn’t enough. I seem to remember that, for many species, numbers of a thousand or so translate into only 90% survival odds. There is a “50/500″ rule that says that at least 50 souls are needed to avoid serious short-term inbreeding. 500 souls are needed for longer term survival. So it may be very naive to presume that putting even a small town on Mars is any kind of insurance for our species. Let’s be careful here.

I personally would rather have seen $700M/year expended on space technology which would have done just that, as proposed by the President, but which Congress pared mercilessly. Remember too that a large piece of the $2.6M budget for MSL was because it didn’t make it’s launch window, and had to be postponed two years. Various reasons for that, but a big one was false economies imposed on the mission by Congress, and the resultant marching armies. The peak $225M/yr expended on MSL won’t get your Mars technology that far.

I personally would also like to see some solid rationale for why we need to be flinging humans to Mars in the first place. Mars can do very well without human footprints, and we could do fine without photos of astronauts waving at the camera with red dust on their helmets.

“When the shameful pork ISS was near cancellation, Democrat Bill Clinton rescued it… and now we have a useless $200 billion Democrat white elephant in orbit which even Nasa wants to dump in the Pacific.”

No one from NASA has stated that, so you must be hearing that from “lifers” that work on the SLS program.

“GWB created and funded COTS”

To be clear, Bush43 funded the Commercial Cargo, but not Commercial Crew – that was Obama.

And while we’re at it, you left Bush43’s Constellation program off your rant list. That was a massive waste of time and money, and it was not going to produce anything truly useful. Regardless, I’m sure you’ll blame the Democrat Congress for that, right?

“Now Democrat Obama and a Dem Congress created the shameless, unneeded, unaffordable, unsustainable earmarked pork SLS/Orion.”

My how some people have selective memories. If you go back and actually look, the main three architects of the SLS are Nelson (D-FL), Shelby (R-AL) and Hutchison (R-TX). How come you glossed over the fact that Republicans were the majority on that?

So the issue shouldn’t be getting politics out of space, but rather how to organize our space efforts to make them more resilient to politics.

“Unfortunately, I suspect that if some were to really look in detail at the Space Act it would spell a lot of trouble for NASA…”

Huh? If anything, NASA would be in a lot better shape if everyone followed The National Aeronautics and Space Act (Pub. L. No. 111–314
124 Stat. 3328 – Dec. 18, 2010). Maybe it’s not perfect, and maybe it does need to be updated, but it’s not too bad.

Certainly Congress did not take it into consideration when they created the SLS program, nor do they seem to be cognizant of Sec. 20102. (c):

“Commercial Use of Space.–Congress declares that the general welfare of the United States requires that the Administration seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space.”

And depending on how much stock you put into such things, that section on the commercial use of space is before the section that gets into the science and HSF stuff.

I don’t think anyone in Congress feels that they are bound by this act, but they also don’t feel any need to replace it with something else. That’s part of the waste that Congress creates.