The NRC committee hints obliquely – and sometimes even a bit more sharply – that NASA is rudderless in a storm with no competent officers on the bridge. But, in the end, they were too unduly respectful of sacred cows and iron rice bowls, too many times steering away from places marked “Here Be Dragons” on the patchwork map they were given to navigate by.

The biggest such failing was to avoid any significant analysis of missions not based on SLS. Given that SLS is the central and most egregious nexus of all of NASA’s other problems, this evasion all by itself guts what should have been the central task of the NRC committee. An examination of “solutions” can’t possibly produce useful results when it is enjoined, from the start, with addressing the single most severe of said problems and are, instead, told to regard said problem as the mandatory solution.

It would have been nice to see at least one protest resignation from the committee over this issue, but these are all members of our current political and technocratic class. They were all elsewhere when the guts were being handed out.

What I am amazed by is how, for station, NASA did its homework and recommended what it wanted and how to get the job done. Yet, for the last nine years, since Griffin, the NASA management seems to go along with anything and everything the incompetents suggest, including Griffin and Obama.

This NRC appears to have quickly and effectively identified a short series of options. Maybe one of these people ought to take over as NASA Administrator and Associate Administrator of human spac exploration and Ops. The NRC in this case did the job that the NASA people owed us years ago.

We already had our entertainment this decade. Iraq and Afland. RGO

The commercial space initiatives that came to fuition on Obama’s watch were not his creatures, they had been set in motion in prior administrations going all the way back to Reagan’s. Like Nixon with the first Moon landing, or Bush 41 with the fall of the Berlin Wall, Obama just happened to be the guy in the Big Chair when the crop sprouted. He didn’t plow and he didn’t plant.

Of the two people most responsible for direct management of space efforts to this point on Obama’s watch, I’m inclined to give Garver more credit than Bolden. We won’t know for sure until upcoming decisions about Commercial Crew are made. If these are well-made decisions, then I’ll humbly beg Charlie’s pardon and accord him the credit. But the best thing Obama ever did for space policy was to largely ignore it.

Good thing we have a bunch of Noahs working in commercial space.

(Okay, I apologize for that.)

What’s being advocated is private enterprise. And it is going to happen. It is in fact happening right before our eyes.

I think that “village idiot” has done more for the American space program than any President since probably JFK. Bronco was not a space cadet but he did listen to the space cadets he hired and he did help get commercial space up on its feet and running.

Perhaps you should consider the state of your own being before attempting to attach such labels to others.

NASA has said it would do quite a number of things over the past 30-odd years. With the exception of robotic probes hither and yon, it has mostly failed to deliver. NewSpace, in contrast, has delivered everything it has had time to deliver. It continues, pell-mell, to expand its capabilities and broaden the scope of what it can deliver. In 24 months or less it will deliver live human beings to orbit and return them safely. Perhaps the most relevant thing NewSpace has delivered is the growing realization that space doesn’t have to be insanely expensive. The fact that it has been until now is a consequence of the inherent wastefulness and bumbling of government, not an intrinsic characteristic of the pursuit.