Dwayne Day has a long, but worthwhile description of how bad the reporting has been on the president’s space initiative, and the source of the mythical trillion dollar program.

Jeff Foust has a related piece on how badly the administration and particularly NASA has handled the media, with the danger that this president’s space initiative may share the fate of his father’s.

I remain very concerned about this program, because I think that the approach is fundamentally technically flawed. If Dennis Wingo is right, they’ve narrowed down the trade space far too much too early, by looking at a binary decision between building at ISS with EELVs (a bad idea for two reasons–ISS and EELV) or building a heavy lifter and replicating Apollo. Either approach will result in a program that’s ultimately unsustainable, if it succeeds at all.

There are other options, but it requires new thinking that NASA is clearly not yet ready for. I think that the president’s initiative would have a much better chance if he had set up a clean new agency, rather than giving it to the existing NASA, just as we did when NASA was established forty six years ago. It’s not clear that Code T as such will be able to break out of NASA think as long as it’s a code within the agency, rather than one that’s independent.