There's been a very interesting discussion in comments over at Space Politics about VSE, ESAS, and public perception. Jim Muncy challenges us to an exercise:

I would respectfully request everyone ask themselves two separate and distinct questions. Answer them independently, in any order you want.

1) As a prelude, add any “really important problems” you think are missing from the list of challenges* Ray laid out. Then ask yourself this question: given that people care about BIG PROBLEMS, why should the American people care about a VSE that does not deliver results on ANY of those problems.

2) Taking the broad outlines of the VSE as a start, and Ray’s list of challenges as the metric of success, design an implementation strategy for the VSE that maximizes the chance of a high score (adding up the progress across all the challenges). Does your strategy look anything like ESAS?

I talked to Paul Spudis, who served on the Aldridge Commission, at lunch last month at the Space Frontier Conference. I posited to him the thesis that in choosing ESAS, NASA has essentially thumbed its nose at most of the commission's recommendations, and asked him how many of them he thought were still being implemented, and how many ignored. He said that it was an interesting question, and that he was going to go back and reread the report, and perhaps put out a policy paper.

In particular, I think that they've totally lost the connection to national security, but it's also not clear what ESAS does for either the economy in general, or space commercialization in particular, particularly relative to a more open architecture, such as one using commercial propellant delivery. But if some of the commission members were to object now, would anyone care?



*Ray's list:

• accelerated Chinese military and economic power growth without corresponding political reform
  
• the War on Terror
  
• environmental change
  
• avoidance of disasters (terrorist, natural, or other)
  
• recovery from such disasters when avoidance fails
  
• energy independence
  
• economic competitiveness
  
• the spread of WMDs and ballistic missile technology
  

I do remember from the ISDC that there were a lot of less-than-happy looking NASA faces after Paul's talk at ISDC. One of the things I liked about O'Keefe's approach was that I, as an individual taxpayer, could go see what was going on. I was at the Pres. Comm. mtg. in NYC. I was at one of the Lunar Roadmapping sessions in Houston. I wasn't invited to any of the stuff in 2006 that led to the '181 Things to do on the Moon', and mostly didn't hear about any of them. Quelle difference.

For some reason your post reminded me of one that I wrote in December 2005 over at the Selenian Boondocks called 'We're on the Road to Nowhere', so I went back and re-read it. An interesting application of the Talking Heads song, to be sure.

Space settlement can help with environmental change, global disaster resilience and recovery, energy independence and economic competitiveness, but there are more direct means with higher political payoffs. I think Jim's metric is wrong. Elected officials try to win votes and that involves pork. The optimization problem should be to get the best space agenda that includes the maximum amount of pork with sufficient cover for the payoff to not be a liability.