…and knocking down a straw man, over at The Space Review, by Dr. Day:

Occasionally, space activists critical of NASA claim that whereas the civilian space agency is a badly-run bureaucracy that ought to be eliminated and replaced with something else, the military manages to do a much better job with its space program. The military, which they believe to be immune to congressional micromanagement and political interference, somehow manages to do great things in space.

Which “space activists critical of NASA”? With whom is he arguing? Can he name names? I wouldn’t claim that this argument has never been made, or that there aren’t people who hold such a view, but I’m not aware of any. It certainly isn’t representative of “space activists” in general. So I’m not sure what his point is. He then goes on to kick the straw out of the thing with a list of past and current DoD space (and other) procurement screwups, with which anyone who has been following things is quite familiar. And his conclusion?

By now you might have detected a common theme here: procurement of complex hardware is hard. Many projects are over-budget and behind schedule, not just at NASA, but everywhere.

Actually, that’s not the common theme that I detect. The common theme that I detect is that the government procurement system for space is seriously FUBAR, whether civil or military. One of the places that such cost and schedule problems aren’t the case (at least not to the huge degree that the government programs are) is SpaceX. Yes, things have taken longer than they hoped, and probably cost more, though we have less insight into that, because we don’t know what the original estimates were, but here’s the bottom line: they have mostly developed both a launch system and a pressurized return module, capable of carrying crew with the addition of life support and launch escape, for about a hundredth of the cost that NASA estimates it will take to develop Ares I alone. And what is the “uncommon” theme here? SpaceX is doing it with their own money, and not subject to government procurement rules and the dictates of porkmeisters on the Hill.

[Early afternoon update]

Clark Lindsey has further thoughts:

SBIRS and many such projects at least have the virtue of advancing the state of the art. ARES I retreats from the state of the art. Rather than building on lessons learned from the Shuttle and taking a step forward towards practical, low cost reusable space transport, Griffin backtracked the agency and led it down the Ares I dead end where no development path to lower cost space access exists. Furthermore, it was known from the start that Ares would be hugely expensive both to develop and to operate. It is just an added insult to the taxpayer that, on top of all that, Ares turned out to have several serious technical problems that resulted in delays and even more costs. Hanging around with a rough crowd offers no excuse for this miserable project.

Indeed.