Onwards and upwards,

– Charles

“Boeing applauds the president’s balanced approach to developing affordable commercial crew and cargo transportation in areas of proven technology, while he simultaneously accepts the challenge for the United States – as the world’s leader in space exploration…

As we have for more than 50 years, Boeing supports NASA’s spaceflight endeavors, working with our customer to achieve affordable commercial crew and cargo transportation under NASA’s Commercial Crew program, as well as America’s heavy-lift rocket to beyond Earth orbit, the Space Launch System.”

Translation: Great, we get to keep feeding out of both of these troughs!

A real policy update would have made some hard choices between Shuttle-derived, EELV, and new entrants, shutting down one of those three legs. Genericizing references to SLS and EELV and adding flowery language about innovative propulsion and contracting techniques that almost never get funded doesn’t fix the industry’s fundamental problems and continues to pass the back to the taxpayer.

I expected a lot better from Rich DalBello’s return to OSTP. If DalBello going to pass along pointless policy updates like this, he’s not earning his taxpayer-supported salary and should head back to Intelsat.