While this Orlando Sentinel columnist makes some valid points in his criticism of the space agency, he also takes some cheap, and unfair shots.

You know we are headed for a boondoggle when the agency’s marketing division starts up a Web page called, “Why the Moon?”

And the first sentence is, “If you asked 100 people why we should return to the moon, you’d probably get 100 answers — or more!”

Translation: We can’t come up with one good one.

I’d call that a mistranslation. It’s like saying that we shouldn’t have removed Saddam because we didn’t find WMD. It really is possible for there to be more than one reason to do something (and in fact, most decisions are made on that basis–any one reason might not, per se, be sufficient, but a combination of them often are).

It may in fact be true that none of the reasons listed are good (I haven’t bothered to check out the site to see), but one certainly can’t logically infer that from the fact that there are more than one, or even a hundred. But this part is actually a misrepresentation of history:

NASA once took on the mission of providing cheap, routine access to space with the shuttle. Then it took on the mission of building and servicing a space station.

Then came two shuttle disasters. And before the station was even half-built, agency officials began complaining they had no mission and needed to fly off into the solar system.

We still don’t have safe and routine access to space. And now, we won’t have our grandiose research platform up there either.

Which “agency officials” were making such complaints? Can he name names? In reality, much of NASA would have been content to continue to fly the Shuttle, complete the station, and finally hope to get some value out of it, even after Columbia. There are no doubt “agency officials” who, if asked over a beer, would say that would be the best course even now, given the problems with Ares 1 and Orion, and the fact that we have been getting a lot better at launching Shuttles. That was certainly the prevailing agency attitude in 1989, when President Bush’s father announced the Space Exploration Initiative, and NASA sabotaged it both indirectly, by coming up with a ridiculously overpriced program, and directly by actively lobbying against it on the Hill (one of the reasons that Dick Truly was fired).

In general, it’s unfair to blame NASA for what is really a failure of the entire federal space policy establishment. NASA doesn’t establish goals, or make policy (though it will often play bureaucratic games to attempt to influence it).

The space station was the “next logical step” in proposed plans for space, going all the way back to the fifties, based on von Braun’s vision. The problem was that the “logical step” before it was to establish affordable and routine access to orbit. The Shuttle was an attempt to do, but a failed one. Unfortunately, the policy establishment failed to realize this until long after space station plans had jelled into one dependent on the Shuttle (and later, the Russians, which is why it is at such a high inclination, increasing the cost of access).

Yes, NASA “took on the mission,” but it failed at it. And with subsequent failures, such as X-34 and X-33, the nation has learned the wrong lesson–that if NASA can’t reduce cost to orbit, it can’t be done, and we should simply give up on the project, and go back to the way we did it in the sixties. But the failure wasn’t due to the fact that it can’t be done, but rather than it can’t be done the way NASA does things: developing and operating its own systems, for its own uses. Government agencies, by their nature, are not well suited to either developing or running cost-effective transportation systems.

It is understandable and natural to want to maximize the value of something in which we have invested many tens of billions of dollars over the years, and it does seem like a waste to abandon the ISS just a few years after its completion, which took decades to accomplish. But there’s a concept called “throwing good money after bad” in which too many people engage. The fact that we spent a hundred billion dollars on ISS doesn’t make it worth a hundred billion dollars. It may, in fact have negative value, like the proverbial white elephant that costs too much to feed and care for.

The mistake of the Vision for Space Exploration was not in establishing a national goal of moving the nation (and humanity) beyond earth orbit. Such a bold and broad policy statement of our ultimate goals in space was in fact long overdue.

The mistake was in specifying in too much detail the means and schedule to do so, and in the failure to recognize that we never completed the job that was supposed to be performed by the Shuttle–developing affordable access to space. This is a capability without which attempts to open up the frontier will remain as unsustainable as they were during Apollo, and to repeat Apollo (albeit in slow motion), which is essentially NASA’s current plan, is to repeat that mistake.

Yes, the Shuttle was a mistake, as was a space station based on the assumption that it had met its goals, but that doesn’t make the goal of the Shuttle a mistake. Achieving that goal remains key to supremacy in space, for both civil and military purposes, and it has to be done before we can seriously contemplate human exploration and development of the solar system. But to blame NASA for these mistakes is wrong, not just because there’s plenty of blame to go around, but because if we believe that NASA is the problem, we won’t address the other very real sources of the problem, and we’ll continue to make such policy mistakes.

[Monday morning update]

More commentary over at Clark’s place.