That's the title (except theirs is declarative, not interrogative) of an op-ed piece in the business section of today's Journal (sorry, subscription required) by Holman Jenkins, in which he quotes yours truly, Henry Vanderbilt and Charles Lurio:

We put these views in the paper as a public service. NASA can be expected to dismiss them. Most of the media, bound up in its notion of legitimate "sources," reports only the views of NASA, the lobbying sector and the congressional delegations whose main interest is keeping the pork flowing.

Political reality is that government does not admit mistakes, briskly decide not to throw good money after bad, junk failing organizations and start over with a clean sheet. That's what business does.

To his credit, and at the risk of ridicule, NASA's Mr. Griffin has at least given the best explanation of why space colonization is important: survival of the species over the long term. Yet already visible is the unworkable budget logic that's destined remorselessly to deflate NASA's conceit that only a government-led program, at a cost of billions of dollars per astronaut, can get personnel and equipment the first 100 miles of whatever journeys we take to elsewhere in the solar system.

NASA's core competence, which Mr. Griffin is fighting to retain, consists of treating space as fit terrain for occasional budgetary blowouts, with the inevitable intervening hangovers.

This may be a way to keep its massive civil service and contractor armies together. But it's the enemy of routine access to earth orbit, which would allow space finally to become a thriving part of our human economy and make it affordable to contemplate a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars.

Note the new media flavor. Also, go check out Henry's latest thoughts (probably not a permalink):

This plan is crippled from the start, in that it doesn't contemplate more than minor trims and reshuffles of the current Shuttle/Station standing army, and it calls for development of not one but two major new NASA-proprietary launch vehicles rather than working with existing US and world commercial launch assets. The combination ensures costs will be far too high for the program to have any chance of doing sustainable deep-space exploration over the long term - possibly too high to allow NASA to even make it past the first major hurdle, simultaneous winddown of Shuttle/Station and development of the oversized new "CEV" Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay and the large new CLV launcher to lift it.

[Update at mid morning]

This part bears a little comment:

It may not be important in the grand scheme of things, a $16 billion a year agency. But one thing has changed: There's now a popular constituency for space policy that does more than just tune in for the blast-off extravaganzas. Blame the Web: We told you last year how seething space fans had kept Congress's feet to the fire and ended up saving a bill designed to speed development of private space tourism.

The same folks are also a source of critique of NASA's Exploration Systems Architecture Study, issued last month, mostly in consultation with the usual suspects -- the giant aerospace contractors, who've been NASA's primary iron triangle sounding board since Gemini. Now there's an effective peanut gallery, their voices magnified by the Web, which has sprouted numerous sites devoted to criticizing and kibitzing about NASA.

This plan actually wasn't in consultation with the usual suspects, or at least not all of them (other than probably ATK-Thiokol for the SRB, and Lockmart for ET mods). At least in Boeing's case, this architecture is not at all what they recommended in their architecture studies. The sixty-day study was strictly a NASA-internal activity, initiated and led by Mike Griffin and Doug Stanley, and as far as I can tell, they paid little attention to industry input, except what they needed from the contractors named above to flesh out their Shuttle-derived designs.

[4 PM EDT update]

Instapundit has more excerpts, including the quotes.

He is jumping the gun by a fair bit. Orbital flights to Bigelow's hotel are probably five to seven years away. Suborbital is still a couple years away.

Of course, most of the vision is five years away too.

The getting-to-the-moon part of the vision is (at least) thirteen years away.

The article does contain a couple of factual errors. Griffin did recently commit a classical gaff which he is trying to backtrack on (i.e. telling the truth that makes people angry) that the shuttle and the station were mistakes. So much for never admitting mistakes.

Also, far from standing in the way of commercial acecss to space, NASA is throwing open station resupply/crew transfer to competitive bids. The alt.space crowd will therefore have no more excuses if they fail to step up to this opportunity.

I also suspect that the confident predictions of a few that VSE is going to blow up spontaniously, while based certainly on certain precedents, will not become reality.

There's a certain amount of hand waving there, as one would expect in an editorial. Certain things are dismissed or simplified that happen to be important, even when their own proponents are not as optimistic as Mr. Jenkins. For instance:

"Next year, his new backer Richard Branson, billionaire chief of the Virgin conglomerate, hopes to fly test passengers to the edge of space..."

Actually, VG has no plans to start test flights next year. It's several years away, by VG's own statements.

"Paying cargo will soon fly aboard a rocket built by Elon Musk..."

Well, Musk actually has to _do_ it first. Lots of people have been building rockets for lots of years, and one thing they have in common is that all of them tend to blow up a few times early in the test program. Musk himself has said that he can fund three failures.

"When has a manned spaceflight project come within shouting distance of its own budget forecasts in recent memory?"

A pithy reply might be with another question: "How many private spaceflight proposals have emerged in the last decade and a half, and how many of them have actually succeeded?" Anybody remember Roton, Kistler, LunaCorp, MirCorp, etc.? But a direct answer to the question would be that the space shuttle Endeavour was actually built for less than the initial cost estimate.

I actually agree with the sentiment of the op-ed, but dislike the tone. Scorn is a rather useless emotion when trying to convince others of your rightness.

ESAS did not come from thin air.

Griffin's plan arises from the Planetary Society report which was overshadowed by the Aldridge Commission. But its pretty much all there, including the stick SRB CEV.

As I recall, the Planetary Society does have more members than any other space advocacy group. Permanent human settlement "out there" as the only viable "why" remains HUGE and should not be discounted.

Also, don't forget if Griffin stiff arms Senator Nelson (Democrat) and/or Senator Hutchinson (GOP) too forcefully, will the White House back Griffin up in a fight over no shuttle retirement until CEV flies? What about the next White House?

In his heart, Griffin may wish to dump ISS /STS today, but that decision can only be made at a higher pay grade than Griffin has and even saying it causes furor amongst his NASA staff.

It is not within Griffin's power to go all alt-space today. t/Space needs to fly on its own dime as soon as possible. Then, the ice will break.

ESAS did not come from thin air.

Who said it did?

Bill White is correct. Rutan winning the X Prize opened a lot of doors, even at NASA which is now preparing to yield low Earth orbit to private companies. The first private company that flies someone into LEO (and back) on its own dime (i.e., not depending on NASA or DOD to foot the bill, like a lot of internet rocketeers seem to want) will change the world and even NASA.

How anyone can seriously believe in a 2018 date for anything from the Federal Government (or almost any other institution, for that matter) is beyond me. It might as well be 2118. Considering we're not even close to finishing the Space Station 20 years after it was first proposed should give you a clue as to the likelyhood of NASA ever going back to the Moon or beyond.

> Also, far from standing in the way of commercial acecss to space,
> NASA is throwing open station resupply/crew transfer to competitive bids.
> The alt.space crowd will therefore have no more excuses if they fail to
> step up to this opportunity.

Of course, there's no opportunity at present. NASA administrators have talked about opening ISS resupply to the private sector for years, but there's still no RFP. The draft RFP, which was supposed to be out this summer, never appeared, and there's no sign of the final RFP that was supposed to be out by fall.

Blaming private enterprise for "failing" to "take advantage" of a non-existant opportunity is absurd.

Apart from the lack of action on NASA's part, there's another problem. Mark's rhetoric makes ISS resupply sound like a vast market. In reality, NASA has set aside less than 1% of its budget for ISS resupply.

NASA is not "throwing open the doors"

The bulk of NASA's money will go to launching supplies for VSE, not ISS. NASA has slammed that door shut to private enterprise with its ESAS architecture.

Mark is advocating a "separate but equal" policy where private-enterprise is confined to the "colored" section (ISS) while the front parlor is off limits to everyone but NASA and NASA contractors. As usual, of course, separate is not equal and the front parlor scarfs up more than 99% of the funding.