A month or so ago (when I originally wrote this post, but never placed it anywhere else), over at the American Spectator, Jeffrey Lord, a former Reagan White House political director, is disappointed with Rick Santorum over his recent mocking of Newt’s moon base:

What in the world is Rick Santorum thinking?

Bad enough that Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry briefly put themselves out there to appear as the anti-capitalist candidates.

In this corner, the instant reaction to that mercifully short epidemic of conservative Bain bashing was that if that’s where Newt and Perry were headed on such a major conservative principle that Reagan so exemplified — they should withdraw. Gingrich, typically, candidly admitted a mistake and stopped. His Super PAC ads vanished. Perry hung on to the idea, lost the support of a prominent South Carolina backer on the eve of the South Carolina primary, and withdrew.

Now, for whatever reason, Rick Santorum is singing the same anti-conservative, anti-Reagan song — just a different verse. This is his strategy to be The Conservative Alternative to moderate Mitt Romney? By joining Romney in rejecting the Reagan space legacy? Just as everybody is reminded both of Ronald Reagan’s 101st birthday and the late January 1986 Challenger tragedy?

…Santorum’s ad and his Op-Ed, meant to mock Gingrich, in reality can only distinctly not help Santorum’s struggling campaign. Gingrich will surely make the inevitable — and correct — connection between Santorum’s ad and a serious attack on the Reagan space legacy — and the dreams of America itself. “We’ll continue our quest in space…. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue,” said President Reagan that tragic January night. Well, no they won’t. Not if Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney have anything to say about it. “I promise,” says Santorum.

Worse, whether Santorum’s staff understands it or not the mocking Santorum ad and Op-Ed is an insult to the memory of seven extraordinarily brave Americans who 26 years ago this past January 28th gave their lives to continue the American journey into space. A journey, as Ronald Reagan well knew, into the future that America has always been, and will always be, about.

Lord is unhappy with Romney, too, but less disappointed:

Romney is so uncomprehending of conservatism there isn’t enough space to list. But his remark that he would fire anybody who came to him with a suggestion to continue Reagan’s space legacy with a program to colonize the moon was stunningly telling of exactly the problems a Romney nomination will bring. Befuddling, intellectually incoherent, and utterly unable to articulate visionary principles of liberty and freedom if his election depended on it. Which, of course, it will if he is the nominee.

As I discussed over at PJMedia a few weeks ago (where I also had a suggested speech for Newt to reboot the space portion of the campaign):

A large part of the criticism has been a vigorous massacre of a legion of space-policy straw men, perhaps the most egregious of which is the accusation that Newt’s plans would cost half a trillion dollars, a grossly inflated figure based on a NASA study performed over two decades ago during the first Bush administration, and a conservative conventional-wisdom assessment from John Logsdon, former head of the Space Policy Institute. This is ironic, because Newt has long proposed fundamental NASA reforms that would dramatically reduce the costs of human spaceflight.

But is there a clear line from Reagan’s actual space policy to Newt’s proposed one? Perhaps, but I don’t think in the way that Mr. Lord thinks. In terms of NASA, most people think of Reagan’s space legacy as what eventually became the International Space Station, though it was called “Space Station Freedom” during the Reagan administration, and while it was always international, it didn’t become Russianized until the Clinton administration, when they saw it as an opportunity to provide foreign aid for the Russians to bribe their engineers to not sell weapons to our enemies without using the State Department’s budget (for those wondering, shockingly, it didn’t work). That, and ending commercial payloads on the Space Shuttle as a result of the Challenger loss. Reagan never offered up any further ambitions in space, certainly nothing beyond low earth orbit, to which NASA’s astronauts have been confined since 1972 (forty years this coming December, the anniversary of the last moon landing). So in that regard, it’s not clear just what Mr. Lord means.

But as I wrote at National Review Online years ago, shortly after Reagan’s passing, his real space legacy is one with which most are unfamiliar — he created a friendly legal and regulatory environment for commercial space, and with the end of taxpayer-subsidized competition from the Space Shuttle, a market as well. This eventually led to the modern commercial launch industry that is on the verge of delivering not just cargo, but in the next few years crew to and from ISS, allowing NASA to focus on getting beyond low earth orbit, if Congress can ever be persuaded to let it.

And along those lines, as is often the case with conservatives not paying close attention, and justifiably viscerally opposed to Barack Obama and all his works, Mr. Lord mischaracterizes administration policy:

Instead of Bain bashing, Santorum is attacking Gingrich over the ex-Speaker’s vow to return America to space exploration with a vengeance — in the form of a moon colony. An obvious intent to carry forward with the Reagan space legacy made all the more potent by the Obama administration’s deliberate halt to the very idea of a serious 21st century American presence in space.

Emphasis mine.

This is actually pretty close to the opposite of what the administration proposed. The new policy replaced a failing program, over cost, underfunded and slipping more than a year per year in schedule, and driven primarily by pork, with an affordable one that promised to make it much more cost effective to send humans not only into orbit, but to places far beyond in the coming years. As I noted at the time the policy was rolled out:

What the administration is doing finally ending the model of the government having a state socialist design bureau to build a monopoly transportation system for its own use, at tremendous cost, which is politically supportable because of all the pork it provides to Alabama, Florida, and Texas. It proposes to expand the COTS program to provision of crew changeout in addition to cargo delivery, encouraging competition, and providing a robust capability that won’t put us out of business when the government rocket fails, as has happened twice with the Shuttle in the past quarter century, for almost three years each time. Instead of a program projected to cost many tens of billions over the next decade for a NASA-owned-and-operated new rocket (Ares I) that will cost billions per flight of four astronauts, it is going to invest 6 billion dollars in developing private capability, with multiple competitors, and do it on a fixed-price, pay-for-performance basis, rather than the wasteful cost-plus model that inevitably results in overruns due to the perverse incentives.

At the same time, it is going to divert the funds being wasted by NASA on that redundant and unnecessary new rocket, and put them back into R&D for the kind of hardware necessary to actually get beyond low earth orbit (such as earth-departure stages, landers, propellant storage facilities, lunar resource utilization, etc.), R&D that had been starved by Mike Griffin in his desperation to find funds for his out-of-control Ares program. Yes, the administration has said that the moon is no longer an explicit, scheduled goal, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t go there. In fact, we’ll be in much better shape to do so with the new plans than we ever would have with the current ones, should we decide to do so in the future. And in addition to the moon, we’ll have the capability to visit, or divert asteroids, missions to the moons of Mars, and perhaps even Mars’s surface, because instead of wasting money on a new launch vehicle, we will have developed the affordable in-space infrastructure that allows us to do other things once private industry delivers us to orbit.

I wonder, amidst his paen to Newt’s vision, if Mr. Lord is aware that Newt, along with former House science committee chairman (Republican, and conservative) Bob Walker, actually came out in support of the Obama policy at the time, in an Op Ed at the Washington Post?

With the new NASA budget, the leadership of the agency is attempting to refocus the manned space program along the lines that successive panels of experts have recommended. The space shuttle program, which was scheduled to end, largely for safety reasons, will be terminated as scheduled. The Constellation program also will be terminated, mostly because its ongoing costs cannot by absorbed within projected NASA budget limits. The International Space Station will have its life extended to at least 2020, thereby preserving a $100 billion laboratory asset that otherwise was due to be dumped in the Pacific Ocean by middecade. The budget also sets forth an aggressive program for having cargo and astronaut crews delivered to the space station by commercial providers.

The use of commercial launch companies to carry cargo and crews into low earth orbit will be controversial, but it should not be. The launch-vehicle portion of the Constellation program was so far behind schedule that the United States was not going to have independent access for humans into space for at least five years after the shutdown of the shuttle. We were going to rely upon the Russians to deliver our astronaut personnel to orbit. We have long had a cooperative arrangement with the Russians for space transportation but always have possessed our own capability. The use of commercial carriers in the years ahead will preserve that kind of independent American access.

Reliance on commercial launch services will provide many other benefits. It will open the doors to more people having the opportunity to go to space. It has the potential of creating thousands of new jobs, largely the kind of high-tech work to which our nation should aspire. In the same way the railroads opened the American West, commercial access can open vast new opportunities in space. All of this new activity will expand the space enterprise, and in doing so, will improve the economic competitiveness of our country.

Lest one think that this was another “sitting on the couch with Pelosi” moment for the former speaker, note that few if any Republicans (or Democrats for that matter) in Congress, with the exception of Dana Rohrabacher (who has also voiced support for the administration’s approach) have thought harder or deeper about space policy than these men. So while his criticism of Santorum (and Romney) is apt, which Newt is Mr. Lord supporting? The one who agrees with Barack Obama on his space policy, or the one who is proposing a lunar colony, to be self supporting and commercial, with competing providers, but driven by basic government-supported technology development?

He doesn’t have to make a choice, actually. They’re the same Newt, and the same plan.

[Note: as I said above, I wrote this a month or so ago, but figured that it was better late than never when it came to publishing it, even here, particularly given all the fresh nonsense emanating from the Hill on commercial providers and crew safety.]