That was quick. My NRO piece is up. Almost as good as blogging.

[Update at 5:20 Eastern]

Clark Lindsey has more thoughts on the (futility of) the Scuttle the Shuttle campaign.

And as Bill White points out, for once, the Space Frontier Society and the LA Times are on the same page. Probably for entirely different reasons, though...

[Update a few minutes later]

The press should really give up on trying to get this right:

Each shuttle mission costs about $450 million for a few days in low-Earth orbit.

There is no single, always usable number for the cost of a single Shuttle mission. As I pointed out in my NRO piece, the last mission cost over ten billion, and this one will have cost about five.

Which is a good time to reiterate my point about costs of space access.

It's the flight rate, stupid!

[Update at 9:40 PM Eastern]

Mark Whittington says:

...I take my guidence [sic] from Dr. Hawking in that ultimately the thing to be accomplished is the spreading of humankind across the Solar System and ultimately the stars, to ensure our survival at least until the death of the universe.

Believe me, no one in Washington, with control over the federal pursestrings, is talking about that as a national goal or purpose for the space program, and if they are, ESAS is one of the most cost-ineffective means to achieve that goal.

Fortunately, others, with more foresight, are, and are acting upon it.

There's a typo there- the name of the chief engineer was omitted.

"One of them was Bryan O’Connor, the Associate Administrator for Safety and Mission Assurance, who (as his title indicates) is responsible for flight safety and reliability. The other was chief engineer [_____.] Mike Griffin, the NASA administrator, overruled them and made a decision to fly."

Heh. Well, that's like blogging, too...

Excellent point! What is true for space is also true for any economic activity. When you go to a hospital the true cost of your care is not just calculated by the costs to the immediate attending physician, but to the costs of the upkeep of the entire staff and hospital etc. Many of those costs are fixed so the larger the number of paying patients, the cheaper the cost of the medical care.

Paying being the key point. I'm looking at busted mortgages at work and the credit reports in the files are filled to overflowing with unpaid medical bills that have gone to collection (but which could be ignored for the purposes of originating the mortgage). I'm stunned and dispirited by the amount of fraud I'm seeing. I can see why the Nigerians like us so much.

As for the flight rate - how can that be the answer when ESAS is going to give us, what, two flights a year? If the true secret of reducing costs was to fly more often then wouldn't ESAS be flying a larger number of smaller payloads to increase the flight rate? Clearly the answer is to try to control the costs of any individual launch that carries as much as it possibly can.

Right? Right? ;-)

Rand, your NRO piece is outstanding.

"Believe me, no one in Washington, with control over the federal pursestrings, is talking about that as a national goal or purpose for the space program"

Except for Mike Griffin. A Minor exception, I know.

Well said, Mark.

Griffin was on "Meet the Press" not long after confirmation and he told Tim Russert that it was human destiny to permanently settle the solar system, and he wanted America to be part of that.

Has anyone at that level within the U.S. government ever been so blunt on that point?

But upon further reading, this caveat from Rand very likely excludes Griffin:

with control over the federal pursestringsS

Thus, I agree with both of you. Heh!

Bill, no simgle person has complete control over the purse strings of a particular government agency. Certainly the head of the agency has some control, so does the President, and the head of OMB, and, of course, members of Congress.

Griffin only controls the budget that Congress gives him, and he has limited discretion in how he spends that. And even if he does share that goal, the program he's laid out doesn't do much to contribute to it. It may even be counterproductive, as has most of NASA human spaceflight activities for the past decades.

There must be another way around the "international obligation" argument to complete the ISS. I know I'm oversimplifying, but why couldn't the US say to the Europeans and Japanese: Sorry, we're not going to complete ISS; here's $2B to compensate you for your investment and a commitment to science opportunities on missions to be named later. And since the international relations is an issue above the level of NASA, the offsets could come in a variety of forms, perhaps that could be beneficial to all parties.
Maybe it is a national pride issue that has no price.

One can have many technical quibbles with the ESAS (and I do), but the basic assumption of the VSE and NASA is that we have to start making steps toward generating more capability in space. NASA is not going away (government agencies don't do that). Thus, we must attempt to steer it in the right direction. The VSE does that by setting the Moon as an immediate goal. What's more, the Vision specifically spells out the activities to be done there; they include (specifically mentioned) the using of lunar resources with the goal of creating new spacefaring capability.

The President and NASA are moving away from Shuttle as expeditiously as the political realties allow it. The new CEV system and lunar architecture isn't perfect, but at least it's aiming us in the right direction. Until we have the ability to get to the nearest place in space with usable material and energy resources (our Moon), we really won't be going anywhere. Once we have the ability to get to the Moon and if we can learn to use the resources there to create a transportation infrastructure, we can go anywhere in the solar system we want to.

start making steps toward generating more capability in space.

All steps are not created equal. Some steps go down blind alleys, or achieve so little that they aren't worth taking. This has been the experience with all previous NASA manned megaprojects.

VSE looks like it will take a very long time, and a great deal of money, to develop things that don't do much, and don't offer much room for expansion of capabilities. VSE will likely not achieve anything that is sufficiently worthwhile in its own right (that is, things not being justified as a base for later getting to something that pays for the effort) to justify the program. Fundamentally, VSE is not solving the major problems that prevent us from reaching the ostensible long term goal.

Paul, (and Paul) I think you confuse VSE with ESAS. VSE could, in theory, move the ball down the field, but not as NASA currently plans to implement it.

There's a problem with the claim that if this flight is damaged by foam they could use ISS as a safe haven because they can always launch a rescue mission. That problem is that if this happened, we then would have had _three_ shuttle launches in a row that suffered major foam events, with two of them being extremely severe (loss of vehicle, damage of vehicle). So in that event, it is even _less_ safe to launch a rescue shuttle. The foam would be telling a story--that for some reason it is now much more likely to damage/destroy an orbiter.

Polling data reported by Jeff Foust at Space Politics;

There's also a visible difference between Republicans and Democrats on their opinion of the worth of spending money on the shuttle. Among Republicans, 40% thought the money would better spent in some other way (the question doesn't specify if that means within or outside of NASA), while 55% think the shuttle is worth the money; the figures are almost reversed for Democrats: 53% think the money would be better spent elsewhere while 43% think the shuttle is worth it. Over all party affiliations, there's a 48%-48% split on the question.

Democrats favor "dump the shuttle and move on" more than Republicans. Interesting. ;-)

Democrats favor "dump the shuttle and move on" more than Republicans. Interesting.

Not really. I suspect that Democrats have always been more likely to want to "dump the Shuttle," for whatever reason...

I think, as usual, Paul Spudis nails it. ESAS may not be "perfect" (and I'm sure what "perfact" means in the contex of returning to the Moon0, but it is the plan. No one who has been belly aching about it has actually offered any provable reason as to why it is so horrible nor have they offered a viable alternative. In fact, certain members of the Internet Rocketeer Club have been proud in their refusal to offer alternatives.

I suspect that in any case, any concievable plan to return to the Moon would have trade offs and would be complained about, likely by some of the same people who are aghast at the current plan.

The time for developing a commercial trans lunar transportation system will be after people return to the Moon, likely with a lunar version of COTS.

"Democrats favor "dump the shuttle and move on" more than Republicans. Interesting. ;-)"

More like dump the shuttle and NOT move on.

Clark Lindsey has some thoughts on that poll.

> The new CEV system and lunar architecture isn't perfect, but at least
> it's aiming us in the right direction.

Making space transportation more expensive is the "right direction." For whom? Why?

> Until we have the ability to get to the nearest place in space with
> usable material and energy resources (our Moon), we really won't be
> going anywhere.

Who is "we", Paul? NASA already has the ability to get to the Moon, with existing rockets -- *if* you wanted to. You have chosen not to.

If "we" is meant to mean us -- the taxpayers -- I'll ask you the same question Lois Lane asks NASA in a current film -- "How much will these 'ordinary people' have to pay for this trip?"

> Once we have the ability to get to the Moon and if we can learn to use
> the resources there to create a transportation infrastructure, we can go
> anywhere in the solar system we want to.

Yes, that's why we (the people) need the ability to get to the Moon at a price we can afford -- not a price only you (the government) can afford.

An architecture that makes space travel more expensive might be the right direction for you (if you does not include the astronauts who are going to be laid off because of it). It's a step in the wrong direction for *us*.

NASA derived space infrastructure not surprisingly is designed with the same cost philosophy as the Shuttle exhibits – some order of magnitude greater than that possible via the new space sector. Such NASA derived infrastructure may provide existence proof that such infrastructure is possible, however, like the Shuttle it will serve to perpetuate the myth that space infrastructure is hard and beyond the capacity of the new space sector to develop.

The commercial sector is going to have to develop all the stuff again from scratch anyway – at a price the people can afford. Hence the ISS and ESAS does nothing useful in the direct sense, and is actually counter productive in deflecting funding away from more productive activities. In the indirect sense it does pay off the protection racket that is NASA and deflect them into an irrelevant architecture that will provide no direct subsidized competition to the new space sector. In this sense it is actually worth the money - especially considering the glacial pace of NASA development work, this lures NASA firmly onto a side track come train park.

The nice thing about NASA developing a HLV and the infrastructure that will be sized to be launched on it is that next to none of it will be compatible with more sensibly sized new space derived - affordable architecture. Another good reason to promote replacing the Stick with flying the big one twice as often – the market exile that NASA is being lured into would be even more permanent.