The defenders of the ESAS claim that this architecture is the only one that could get political support. This claim seems to be made in the absence of any actual analysis explaining why this is so, and what it is about this particular approach that makes it more (in fact, uniquely) politically palatable than any possible alternative. It implies that any NASA administrator, who knew what was politically viable, would have come to exactly the same conclusion as Mike Griffin did. It assumes that it was the politically inevitable result of any competent manager.

But this belief ignores the fact that Dr. Griffin has been promoting something very like this architecture for years. It’s possible, I suppose, that the sole reason that he’s favored it is because he was prescient in knowing to the nth degree what kind of plan he could get past the Congress, even in the absence of knowing who would be committee chairs ahead of time.

I think it more likely that the plan is simply what he’s always (well, since the eighties) planned to do if he ever was placed in a position to do it. I’m sure he’s quite sincere in his belief that this is the best plan, but that doesn’t make him correct.

Some have been demanding that I provide an alternative plan that would be equally politically viable. Ignoring the fact that it’s not clear that this plan is, over the long haul, if I don’t understand why people think that this one is, I don’t know how to formulate an argument why some other one would be in a way that they’d find convincing.

I’ve got lots of ideas of better ways to implement the president’s broad vision, but until I understand from the current architecture’s proponents why they think that this one uniquely threads the needle, I don’t know how to make a case for any other.

Discuss.

[Update on Wednesday evening]

I’m not going to write new stuff, but this subject reminded me on a piece I wrote right after the Columbia loss:

The lesson we must take from the most recent shuttle disaster is that we can no longer rely on a single vehicle for our access to the new frontier, and that we must start to build the needed orbital infrastructure in low earth orbit, and farther out, to the moon, so that, in the words of the late Congressman George Brown, “greater metropolitan earth” is no longer a wilderness in which a technical failure means death or destruction.

NASA’s problem hasn’t been too much vision, even for near-earth activities, but much too little. But it’s a job not just for NASA–to create that infrastructure, we will have to set new policies in place that harness private enterprise, just as we did with the railroads in the 19th Century. That is the policy challenge that will come out of the latest setback–to begin to tame the harsh wilderness only two hundred miles above our heads.

NASA has learned nothing.

[Update in the evening of November 9th]

Here’s another relevant piece that I’ve written in the last couple years. I continue to be amazed when I look at all of the pieces on space policy that I’ve written over the last few years, because I can find few words in any of them that I would change. I am simultaneously saddened that it all seems for naught.

I ought to gather up all the Fox News pieces, and build them into a book. Having to put together a thousand-word column every week does instill a certain level of discipline, and apparently results in great thoughts, at least occasionally.