The president’s science advisor says that Mike Griffin will ride to the rescue, and save us from the dreaded gap.

Unlike Senator Hutchison, though, who unaccountably thinks gaps are a national security crisis, Dr. Marburger is more sanguine about them. Too much so, in fact, for my taste:

…more gaps in access were likely in the future of the U.S. space program. These gaps are to be viewed as a fact of life in space operations, he suggested.

“There will be future gaps from time to time. The thing to remember is that the president’s plan is a long-term, sustained commitment.” Gaps, he suggested, were simply a part of the continuing process of space exploration.

While I don’t in fact think that “gaps” are that big a deal, given the trivial things that we’re currently doing (and even planning) with our civil manned spaceflight program, I’m quite disturbed by the notion that they are an inevitable feature of space operations. Imagine if he’d said, “there will be future gaps from time to time in our ability to get into the air,” or “there will be future gaps from time to time in our ability to cross the oceans.”

Clearly, this isn’t an attitude that would be acceptable if we were actually doing anything important with humans in space. The fact that he can make such a statement is a window into his perception of the importance of being a space-faring nation, a goal at which the current plans for VSE still fall far short, for decades.