Business 2.0 has a list of nine trendy fads to ignore. One of them is space tourism:

Travel to the final frontier is riskier than buying a vacation home in Aspen. When the first billionaire perishes in the icy void of space, it

More of a note to myself, if anything, to be expanded on later, in another venue.

It strikes me that NASA’s response to the president’s challenge is a statement of fundamental unseriousness about it.

A serious program to go back to the Moon, and beyond, would be based on a foundation of an infrastructure that would dramatically reduce the marginal costs of getting to orbit, operating in orbit, and getting to the points beyond low earth orbit. It would be a decision that would allow dramatic and affordable increases in space operations, for both the government and the private sector.

That they have chosen an architecture that makes the marginal, per-mission costs of doing anything in space as high or higher than they’ve always been indicates that they’re more interested in short-term milestones (getting back to the Moon and completing the lost missions of Apollo) than in opening up a frontier. I thought that I heard the president say something else over a year and a half ago, but perhaps, politically, they’re right, and I’m wrong.

[Update on Saturday afternoon]

Clark Lindsey has some expanded thoughts on this subject.

Jon Goff on trade studies, and why you can use them to justify almost any answer you want.

I haven’t read it yet, but Michael Belfiore has an article in Popular Science about t/SPACE. He’s also going to be live blogging the X-Prize Cup for PopSci.

JSC is evacuating the Mission Control Center in anticipation of the monster storm that may be about to hit them. One wonders what would happen if there was an Orbiter in orbit right now–I don’t think they could just hand that off to the Russians. It makes one question the wisdom of putting a supposedly vital function in such a vulnerable area. There are good geographic reasons for the location of KSC, and Michoud, but having the manned spaceflight center in Houston is an historical accident, because they got a donation from Rice for the land (and it probably didn’t hurt that LBJ happened to be from Texas).

There is a reason, after all, that NORAD is inside the Mountain, and it might make sense for NASA mission control to be in a similarly-secure place.

On the other hand, it also begs the question of whether or not mission control, sixties style, is really needed, or if it’s just a relic of the way we happened to do it then. That space systems are still designed to require the support of hundreds of people on the ground says that maybe there’s something wrong with the way we design them. And it’s not obvious that the new architecture is going to address that.

The BBC has a gallery of pictures of NASA’s exploration architecture. It’s a shame the damned things will cost so much, and do so little.

[Update at 1:30 PM EDT]

It looks like they got them here, if you want high-res versions.

My Freedom of Information Act request to verify OSIDA’s claim that they are on target for December 2005 did not net any documents (all marked proprietary), but it did net a confirmation of the existence of the documents and a confirmation that the scheduled release of the environmental impact statement (EIS) is December 2005.

Ben Chertoff and Carl Hoffman at Popular Mechanics are live blogging the public announcement of NASA’s exploration architecture from NASA HQ. Chertoff’s calling it NASA’s “lunar retread.”

[Update at 1:15 PM EDT]

Griffin on commercial contractors:

…when you use a prime contractor in the traditional way it IS more expensive, but at least you know that you’ll get what you ask for. We don’t want to get in a position where we ask for something and they can’t make it happen.

Yeah, they cost more, but we all know that prime contractors never fail to come through.

I’m with Hoffman:

Only one question about commercial space activities – Rutan, X prize, Bezos, Elon Must [sic], who’s about to launch his first rocket with commercial payload into orbit for a reported $16 million – that was never mentioned by Griffin himself. And that has to make you wonder whether anything has changed at all…

This article describes why NASA’s plans are probably fiscally and politically unsustainable, though you have to read between the lines:

NASA

Henry Vanderbilt isn’t very happy with NASA’s exploration plans:

This Apollo redux has the same fatal flaw as Apollo: The specialized throwaway systems invented to get (back) to the Moon ASAP were (will be) far too labor-intensive at far too low a max flight rate to allow affordable followup. The new ships are not only based in significant part on existing Shuttle components and facilities, but they are to be operated in significant part by the existing Shuttle organization. IE, tens of thousands of people narrowly specialized in various aspects of flying a handful of astronauts on a handful of missions a year – at, by the time all this fixed overhead is added up, billions of dollars a mission.

Like Apollo, NASA’s new ESAS plan has built into it the seeds of its shutdown by some future Congress, once the warm glow of the first few daring missions has once again faded…

…Once what’s come out unofficially so far becomes official, we will have no choice but to decline further support for new NASA exploration funding, and if as seems likely we can’t persuade our fellow SEA members to join us, we will have to regretfully resign.

Sadly, I find nothing at all here with which I can disagree.

[Update a few minutes later]

Aviation Week also says (correctly) that it’s Apollo redux, and is skeptical about its political prospects.

…basically using a replay of the Apollo approach of the 1960s, with updated electronics.

And here’s another problem:

Rewriting the exploration-hardware development plans drafted under his predecessor, Griffin will exert tighter control over hardware design, leaving much less to the imagination of the contractors and perhaps building the new vehicles in NASA facilities.

Shades of X-38…