I haven’t read the whole report yet, so maybe this is in there somewhere, but in this piece from the Gray Lady, it’s clear that the admiral was willing to go further than William Rogers did after Challenger:

“We are challenging the government of the United States” to make up its mind, Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., the commission’s chairman, said yesterday, alluding to the ease with which politicians hail the shuttle program while cutting its budget by 40 percent.

“We need to decide as a nation what we want to do,” Admiral Gehman, who is retired, warned. The solution, he said, was not just a modernized shuttle. “We shouldn’t start by designing the next vehicle,” he said. “That is a trap that we’ve fallen into several times.”

The challenge places President Bush in essentially the same place President Ronald Reagan was after the Challenger explosion. Confronting a $480 billion budget deficit this year and many more years of deficits to follow, does Mr. Bush want to commit to expending the money and energy needed to remake the nation’s space program, the step the commission said was critical to averting a third disaster? Or do problems on earth, like bringing order and democracy to Iraq, battling terrorism or rebuilding another aging technological behemoth ? the electric power grid ? rank higher?

Look, folks. It’s not about money. We’re spending about one percent of the federal budget on space. We’re spending much more on agricultural supports that are starving millions in the Third World. The issue is not how much to spend, but how to spend it.

Do we want a space program that is a jobs program for politically correct engineers, or do we want a space program that actually accomplishes something in space? If so, what are we trying to accomplish?

It’s time to write your congressman and senators, and say, not I want to send astronauts to Mars, or I want to send astronauts to the Moon, but I want my children to be able to go into space, and I want to see a payoff from space, in new resources, and energy, and political freedom. And I want to go into space myself, and it’s none of your damned business why I want to go, any more than one had to fill out a form in the seventeenth century to explain why one wanted to go to America from Europe. I want a debate on the purposes of why we’re spending money on NASA, and I’m tired of the space program being used as an excuse for jobs in the right congressional districts, or foreign aid to countries that don’t act like allies, with no attention being paid to any actual accomplishments in space.

I don’t know if it will do any good, but if it doesn’t now, it never will.