Seriously. I’m sure that he’s a fine engineer, and manager, but why does that mean that we should give his opinion more weight than anyone else’s on the subject of space goals? Just because someone is an expert at implementing a space program doesn’t make them one at justifying it, or determining what it should be.

As is always the case with stories like this, there are implicit underlying assumptions that are never stated. In order to argue where we should be going, one first has to decide why are going into space at all, and that’s not a subject that ever really gets discussed. I assume that Mr. Gavin is into space “exploration,” and assumes that everyone else shares that justification. He thinks that when it comes to the moon, we’ve “been there, done that,” and it’s time to go “explore” somewhere else, and that Mars is much more interesting. But what if the goal is instead, space development, or space defense, or geoengineering, or energy production? In that case, Mars makes no sense at all, and the people who want to send humans there should pay for it themselves.

Of course, I continue to wish that we could get a consensus from all the people with disparate space goals that the best approach is to make space access affordable, which will enable them all. Unfortunately, NASA is only making things worse in that regard (unless COTS, despite the paltry sums being spent on it, succeeds).

[Late afternoon update]

Rampant sarcasm has broken out in comments on this subject at Space Politics.