I’m still too busy to write much, and it’s not going to get much better until the end of the month–it will be a challenge even to do my Fox columns this week and next–but in the meantime, go read this little history of presidential space initiatives by Dwayne Day, over at The Space Review.

For those who aren’t familiar with past attempts to set a new direction for NASA, it provides a lot of good guidance, and potential food for thought as to how to avoid the mistakes of that past. It also debunks the nonsense that anything that NASA does beyond LEO automatically costs four hundred billion dollars (which of course, because NASA is doing it, is automatically inflated to a trillion dollars by clueless commentators).

And by the way, congratulations to Jeff Foust on the one-year anniversary of The Space Review. It should be one of your weekly must-read links if you’re interested in space policy and technology.

[Update on Wednesday]

Clark Lindsey has an email from someone at NASA who says that the SEI cost estimate was even more inflated than Dwayne says (scroll down a little).

…the internal NASA JSC number was $100 Billion — this number was doubled by the comptroller at JSC and then doubled again by the Comptroller at NASA Headquarters.

It wouldn’t surprise me at all.

[Update at 8:45 AM PST]

Dwayne responds in comments.