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In early 2008 Barack Obama campaigned publicly for the support of educators by pointing to his plan for education which on page 15 explicitly said:

"The early education plan will be paid for by delaying the NASA Constellation Program for five years"

Everybody with a brain knew that would end Constellation and all the people transitioning from Shuttle to Constellation would lose their jobs (given that none of the vendors would be able to keep employing those people for 5 years with no cash flowing in from the customer (NASA).

Democrats in the "swing state" of Florida were panicky over this, and aware that space advocates might know about it since the long-standing Obama plan had been reported in space advocate circles as early as fall of 2007, so they setup a big space event for Obama in Florida to fool the space workers. In August 2008, assisted by his go-to guys for fooling space advocates (Senators Glenn and Nelson) Obama went to Titusville and said this:

"Today we have an administration[Bush43] that sets ambitious goals for NASA without giving NASA the support it needs to reach them. As a result, NASA's had to cut back on research, trim their program, which means that after the space shuttle shuts down in 2010, we're going to have to rely on Russian space craft to keep us into orbit. So let me be clear: we cannot cede our leadership in space. That's why I'm going to close the gap, ensure that our space program doesn't suffer when the shuttle goes out of service. We may extend an additional shuttle launch. We're going to work with [Senator]Bill Nelson[D-FL] to add at least one flight after 2010 by continuing to support NASA funding, by speeding the development of the shuttle's successor, by making sure that all those who work in the space industry in Florida do not lose their jobs when the shuttle is retired because we cant afford to lose their expertise." - Barack Obama

President Obama won Florida in 2008 by only a 2.8% margin. Space workers are obviously not enough to make up that entire margin, but they were PART of that margin, which is what "community organizing" aided by "micro targeting" is all about - rounding up lots of special interest groups and pushing the right emotional/political "buttons" to get each group to turn-out and vote even if some groups are turning out having been told this will support interest X and others are turning out having been told it will oppose interest X. Some Obama supporters now try to pretend that Obama meant something other than Constellation as the successor to Shuttle, but at this time in history, none other was proposed by any candidate or policy so Space Workers were clearly supposed to assume Constellation, particularly given the line about preserving ALL their jobs.

By 2012 when Newt Gingrich was talking about a moon colony, even 60 minutes, hardly a right-wing news outlet, had to admit to the dishonesty of the 2008 campaign visit to Florida.

It's a sad truth that many of the space advocacy groups are far more into partisan politics and helping politicians fool their members that they are into actual space policy; Space policy pays nothing, but you can make a good living consulting for and organizing groups of supporters for, national political campaigns. AFAIK none of the people who setup that 2008 event in Florida have ever apologized to any of the thousands of Space Coast workers who were fooled into voting for Obama and then lost their jobs (and in many cases l

In early 2008 Barack Obama campaigned publicly for the support of educators by pointing to his plan for education which on page 15 explicitly said:

"The early education plan will be paid for by delaying the NASA Constellation Program for five years"

Everybody with a brain knew that would end Constellation and all the people transitioning from Shuttle to Constellation would lose their jobs (given that none of the vendors would be able to keep employing those people for 5 years with no cash flowing in from the customer (NASA).

Democrats in the "swing state" of Florida were panicky over this, and aware that space advocates might know about it since the long-standing Obama plan had been reported in space advocate circles as early as fall of 2007, so they setup a big space event for Obama in Florida to fool the space workers. In August 2008, assisted by his go-to guys for fooling space advocates (Senators Glenn and Nelson) Obama went to Titusville and said this:

"Today we have an administration[Bush43] that sets ambitious goals for NASA without giving NASA the support it needs to reach them. As a result, NASA's had to cut back on research, trim their program, which means that after the space shuttle shuts down in 2010, we're going to have to rely on Russian space craft to keep us into orbit. So let me be clear: we cannot cede our leadership in space. That's why I'm going to close the gap, ensure that our space program doesn't suffer when the shuttle goes out of service. We may extend an additional shuttle launch. We're going to work with [Senator]Bill Nelson[D-FL] to add at least one flight after 2010 by continuing to support NASA funding, by speeding the development of the shuttle's successor, by making sure that all those who work in the space industry in Florida do not lose their jobs when the shuttle is retired because we cant afford to lose their expertise." - Barack Obama

President Obama won Florida in 2008 by only a 2.8% margin. Space workers are obviously not enough to make up that entire margin, but they were PART of that margin, which is what "community organizing" aided by "micro targeting" is all about - rounding up lots of special interest groups and pushing the right emotional/political "buttons" to get each group to turn-out and vote even if some groups are turning out having been told this will support interest X and others are turning out having been told it will oppose interest X. Some Obama supporters now try to pretend that Obama meant something other than Constellation as the successor to Shuttle, but at this time in history, none other was proposed by any candidate or policy so Space Workers were clearly supposed to assume Constellation, particularly given the line about preserving ALL their jobs.

By 2012 when Newt Gingrich was talking about a moon colony, even 60 minutes, hardly a right-wing news outlet, had to admit to the dishonesty of the 2008 campaign visit to Florida.

It's a sad truth that many of the space advocacy groups are far more into partisan politics and helping politicians fool their members that they are into actual space policy; Space policy pays nothing, but you can make a good living consulting for and organizing groups of supporters for, national political campaigns. AFAIK none of the people who setup that 2008 event in Florida have ever apologized to any of the thousands of Space Coast workers who were fooled into voting for Obama and then lost their jobs (and in many cases l

In 2010 Obama killed the Constellation program w/o discussing it with congress first and with NO PLAN for ANY American manned spaceflight going forward; his plan only funded the Americans using ISS for a few more years via Russian Soyuz flights before dumping ISS into the Pacific Ocean There was vague rhetoric about new tech development and a possible commercial crew taxi program, but. That was it. Congress had a freak-out because Constellation had been a hard-negotiated bi-partisan program with support and buy-in from the hard-right in congress all the way to the hard-left in congress and supported by both Bush and the Pelosi-Reid team. Constellation had even made it through the 2008 election cycle ans the change of power in congress. Congress under-funded Constellation back then, as they always do to NASA, but Bush and his team did not go around whining about it and blaming the underfunding on Democrat hatred of Bush and/or white people. Obama's supporters have used commercial crew underfunding as "proof" that his opponents are racists; they LOVE this fight.

Obama's plan got such a negative backlash even from prominent Democrats that he cobbled together a plan to come up with a plan and, after months of back-room negotiations, ended up calling for a manned version of the Bush-era commercial cargo program, combined with an extension to ISS operations (which even now not all of the ISS partners have agreed to). Congress (again BOTH parties) were so unimpressed with the plan that they insisted on the SLS rocket as part of the plan and the law that ended up getting written allowed Obama's commercial crew program but also REQUIRED the SLS rocket. Obama signed that into law, but has been playing passive-aggressive games with it ever since. Every year, he tries to shift money from SLS to commercial crew, which angers congress and they in turn refuse to increase the commercial crew funds. He then announces that SLS does not need the money any way, then in separate reports to congress announces that SLS is slipping its schedule due to lack of funds (he actually says it's slipping because of delays to the Orion's service module - but THAT is because ESA is building it because he said we could not afford to have Lockheed build it in the US (an budgetary bankshot))

Congress wants a rocket to enable the US to return to the Moon and go on to Mars.

Obama is adamant that we not return to the Moon and that we will go to Mars someday in the distant future

There's no happy compromise between such opposite views.

Obama's NASA fills its website with Mars-centric rhetoric but absolutely no plan, budget, goals, or schedule (this is called "planning to fail by failing to plan"). He attempts to square-the-circle politically by making it look like he is agreeing to a deep-space future for NASA while in actuality he keeps trying to limit NASA to renting taxis for flights to and from LEO that will be easy for a future President to kill-off (since it will lack the political constituency of a big NASA program). He could EASILY get the funding for commercial crew if he would do 2 things: [1] stop slow-walking SLS and robbing its funds, and [2] agree to let congress increase the NASA budget WITHOUT tying that to an across-the-board budget balloon (boosting NASA would require either cutting something else or violating the budget caps, and Obama insists that he be allowed to bust the caps on all social spending programs if NASA gets a boost); Obama is using NASA in a supremely partisan set of fights and it's VERY bad for NASA.

How about a couple minutes for you to understand exactly why it wasn't allowed.....playing that time passing song....

It was because NASA needed funding for the Space Shuttle. It had nothing to do with safety. Merely, requiring private companies to post bonds prior to each launch covers your safety concerns without requiring a decade long ban.

Further, it's worth noting that many of the companies which by your reckoning can't be trusted to run a safe commercial launch vehicle are the same ones that were building and running NASA's Space Shuttle (as well as having decades of launch experience under their belts).

Further, it is monumentally stupid to claim that commercial launches can be confused with a nuclear attack. One launch isn't going to take out the USSR. For example, here's a story written shortly after the fall of the Shuttle monopoly.

Some of the agency's likely tactics are already evident. One strategem, reported by several observers close to the Shuttle/ ELV controversy, has been to apply pressure on contractors sup- plying major components to NASA to keep them from entering the ELV business. Although nothing has appeared in official docu- ments, it is said that NASA officials have suggested to possible private competitors that their contracts for Shuttle components might be endangered if these firms engaged in private launches. Another tactic has been to try to delay implementation of "full cost recovery," so that NASA could charge Shuttle customers less than the full cost of launches for long enough to capture the market, with the cost picked up by the taxpayer. This could close down production lines for a number of the components needed to construct and launch ELVs, making their later development far more expensive than would otherwise be the case.

What is most disturbing is that NASA's anti-competitive activities could undermine the President's broad initiative on space commercialization by undermining private sector efforts before they can acquire a firm financial footing. The agency would thereby undercut a number of key benefits for Americans that the initiative would otherwise yield.

The first thing you should do before writing stupid drivel is ask yourself, "Gee, is there really a problem here?" But no, you just had to get that anti-libertarian straw man in without regard for the history.

So what you are telling me is that for some odd reason, despite private rocket launches in their own facilities using their own rockets is now considered okay, and done on a regular basis, you are still in a white hot seething astrorage anger and feeling much butthurt because of the way it used to be a long time ago?

And you should too. Because history has a habit of repeating itself. What's going to happen when NASA has the SLS supply chain and SpaceX has the Falcon Heavy, a cheaper and more reliable competitor?

Well, that SLS supply chain, being better connected politically, are going to use their connections to sabotage SpaceX, just like Space Shuttle proponents did commercial space launch back in the 70s or the launch oligopoly did to various would-be competitors in the 80s and 90s.

They're already playing games with the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program which was an attempt by NASA to encourage commercial launch services, including SpaceX, to supply ISS with supplies and personnel. The number of competitors was reduced from six competitors to two by interference from Congress. There's also fishing expeditions for "anomalies" from recent Falcon 9 launches. Notice that nobody else was targeted by that demand for info

Training 'astronauts' for make believe missions on a make believe launcher. If any money existed to pay for asteroid mission hardware the NEA would claim it just like they claimed Constellation.

I think somewhere around $60M per piece, maybe even more given very limited availablity of plutonium-238. USA already ceased production of it::
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2011/09/11/senate-energy-bill-includes-no-pu-238-funding/
PU-238 can only be bought from Russians (as it was done in case of Curiosity power source):
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/mars_rover_curiosity_its_plutonium_power_comes_courtesy_of_soviet_nukes_.single.html
Hovewer RTG will be producing heat and 100-200 W of electricity for 100 years.

I would say something like this is needed:
http://pesn.com/2012/08/22/9602166_Existence_of_1200_C_E-Cat_Test_Report_Confirmed/

Senator Hutchison (R-TX)'s statement following the inaugural flight of Falcon 9 in 2010: "This first successful test flight of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket is a belated sign that efforts to develop modest commercial space cargo capabilities are showing some promising signs. While this test flight was important, the program to demonstrate commercial cargo and crew transport capabilities, which I support, was intended to enhance not replace NASA’s own proven abilities to deliver critical cargo and humans to low Earth orbit. Make no mistake, even this modest success is more than a year behind schedule, and the project deadlines of other private space companies continue to slip as well."

Senator Shelby (R-AL): Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, whose state of Alabama is also a NASA stronghold, further decried the launch as a display merely replicating what “NASA accomplished in 1964.”
“Belated progress for one so-called commercial provider must not be confused with progress for our nation’s human space flight program,” Shelby said. “As a nation, we cannot place our future space flight on one fledgling company’s definition of success.”

Source: SpacePolitics.com

As to your claim that there are no RTGs available: I could build a crude but functional one in about five minutes (if I had a pellet of [insert name of suitable isotope here]), and it's not as if we're short of radioisotopes suited for the task.

Yes we are. The only suitable isotope for these applications is PU-238, and Congress refuses to fund fund further production. Curiosity is the last piece of equipment that will carry an RTG for the foreseeable future.

On a related note, there's a bill in the Senate which will be voted on tomorrow (Thursday) morning which threatens to reduce the proposed funding for robotic missions (like the one described in the summary), commercial crew, and space technology in favor of building a government-designed heavy-lift rocket instead. The Planetary Society has an update describing the situation and is urging people who care about space exploration to call their Senators immediately:

http://www.planetary.org/blog/article/00002584/

More background info on the bill: http://www.spacepolitics.com/2010/07/14/a-quick-review-of-the-senate-nasa-authorization-bill/

For the curious, Bill Nye the Science Guy (the new director of the Planetary Society) and Louis Friedman are hosting a webcast/discussion at 5pm ET today about the future direction of NASA:

http://planetary.org/about/press/releases/2010/0712_Where_Should_We_Go_in_Space_Tell_Bill.html

First off, a full link to the document (instead of the short fact sheet linked in the original post) is here:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/national_space_policy_6-28-10.pdf

It's useful to compare this to the 2006 National Space Policy document issued by the Bush administration:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/national-space-policy-2006.pdf

Space Politics has a pretty good comparison of the two:

http://www.spacepolitics.com/2010/06/28/the-new-national-space-policy-is-out/

I think the revised section on commercial space is quite promising:

Commercial Space Guidelines
The term "commercial," for the purposes of this policy, refers to space goods, services, or activities provided by private sector enterprises that bear a reasonable portion of the investment risk and responsibility for the activity, operate in accordance with typical market-based incentives for controlling cost
and optimizing return on investment, and have the legal capacity to offer these goods or services to
existing or potential nongovernmental customers . To promote a robust domestic commercial space
industry, departments and agencies shall:
Purchase and use commercial space capabilities and services to the maximum practical extent
when such capabilities and services are available in the marketplace and meet United States
Government requirements;
Modify commercial space capabilities and services to meet government requirements when
existing commercial capabilities and services do not fully meet these requirements and the
potential modification represents a more cost-effective and timely acquisition approach for
the government;
Actively explore the use of inventive, nontraditional arrangements for acquiring commercial
space goods and services to meet United States Government requirements, including measures
such as public-private partnerships, hosting government capabilities on commercial spacecraft,
and purchasing scientific or operational data products from commercial satellite operators in
support of government missions;
Develop governmental space systems only when it is in the national interest and there is no
suitable, cost-effective U .S . commercial or, as appropriate, foreign commercial service or system
that is or will be available;
Refrain from conducting United States Government space activities that preclude, discourage,
or compete with U .S . commercial space activities, unless required by national security or public
safety;
Pursue potential opportunities for transferring routine, operational space functions to the
commercial space sector where beneficial and cost-effective, except where the government
has legal, security, or safety needs that would preclude commercialization;
Cultivate increased technological innovation and entrepreneurship in the commercial space
sector through the use of incentives such as prizes and competitions;
Ensure that United States Government space technology and infrastructure are made available
for commercial use on a reimbursable, noninterference, and equitable basis to the maximum
practical extent;
Minimize, as much as possible, the regulatory burden for commercial space activities and ensure
that the regulatory environment for licensing space activities is timely and responsive;
Foster fair and open global trade and commerce through the promotion of suitable standards
and regulations that have been developed with input from U .S . industry;
Encourage the purchase and us

You don't have to wait until November. Bennet already lost his party's nomination.

Quite true, and good riddance. However, given that this is Utah, whoever wins the GOP primary is pretty much guaranteed to win the Senate election. There are two remaining candidates in the GOP primary, Tim Bridgewater and Mike Le. Mike Lee doesn't have anything on his website about space, and Tim Bridgewater doesn't seem to comprehend that NASA is the civilian portion of the country's space program (the Air Force already has their own independent program):

http://www.spacepolitics.com/2010/05/09/with-bennett-out-what-does-his-successor-think-about-nasa/
http://timbridgewater.com/issues-2/faqs/

Q: Would you support Obama's plan for the privatization of NASA?
A: No. The same rockets that send a man to the moon could send a missile across the world to defend our nation. NASA plays a vital role in the security of our nation and the strength of our military. The government has the responsibility "to raise and support" and army. We must be involved in defense related R&D.

The Chinese have no interest in going to the Moon. They are planning a manned space station, to be completed by 2022.

No amount of screaming "the reds are under the beds!!" is going to bring back the unique set of cold war circumstances that made Apollo a success.

It's worth noting that NASA is only able to award $50 million this year due to interference by Congress. They had initially wanted $150M in commercial seed funding, but most of this was diverted by Congress -- in particularly Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Al) -- towards the soon-to-be-cancelled Constellation project.

Why does NASA have to campaign for greater safety standards? Why can't they implement them without the "politicians" approval?

Because unfortunately, it's quite likely that the main reason this is being done is to shut out competitors in private spaceflight. It goes something like this:

* Although the Astronaut Corps is full of brave and intelligent individuals, the fact of the matter is that they have a huge revolving door with ATK, an aerospace/defense contractor which specializes in solid motors. Astronauts know it's quite likely that they'll become an executive at ATK after their astronaut gig is up, and quite a few gigs will be up once the Space Shuttle is retired.

* ATK is a major contractor on the Ares I rocket, which has claims of being 100x-1000x safer than the alternatives, due to the fact that it uses a single large ATK solid motor as its first stage. Of course, quite a few aerospace engineers believe that these claims are total bullshit, and it's quite possible that despite NASA and ATK's publicized calculations, in practice the Ares I will actually be more dangerous than the alternatives (EELVs, DIRECT, SpaceX, etc.). There's a number of potential problems with the Ares I which aren't accounted for in the calculations: thrust oscillation, solid propellant debris clouds, the added difficulty of escaping from a solid rocket, the fact that safety systems have had to be cut out due to mass constraints, etc. Also, the sort of accident factors which go into the Ares I's supposed super-safe accident probability calculations actually only account for an absurdly small percentage of launch accidents in practice.

* Recently the fate of the Ares I has become uncertain, as people are questioning if its wise for NASA to spend $35 billion of its limited funding to develop a new medium-lift rocket which won't be ready until 2017-2019, when plenty of other medium-lift rockets already exist and could become equipped for manned launch for prices ranging from a few hundred million to $3 billion.

* It remains to be seen what'll happen at the hearing, but my guess is that a number of those testifying from NASA will claim that Ares I will be dramatically safer than commercial alternatives, and therefore Ares should continue getting funding instead of looking at alternatives. They'll probably cite the bullshit safety figures again to try to bolster their case. I believe there's one person testifying who's a proponent of commercial spaceflight, and I suspect he'll be beaten down by Congress.

* It's looking like Rep. Jim Oberstar might be heading the hearing. Back in 2004 Oberstar tried (in the interest of safety, of course) to kill off commercial suborbital spaceflight companies like Virgin Galactic by having them regulated at the same sort of levels that mature commercial airlines are regulated.

FYI, it's not a directed budget cut towards NASA -- every single non-military agency has been told by the Obama administration that they may see cuts of 5-10% in order to reduce the deficit.

http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/11/17/sharpening-the-budget-cleaver/
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hBr0LFXMFF1HE6-n_ZTN1829QS1QD9BUTPVG0

On the plus side, if there is in fact a budget cut, it'd hopefully be the cover NASA needs to shut down/reduce its politically well-guarded Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), which uses up a huge part of NASA's budget, but due to its chronically incompetent management has spectacularly failed in basically all of its large projects over the past 30 years.

I really like these recent comments from Jeff Greason, definitely my favorite member of the Augustine Committee, regarding launch safety:

http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/10/22/a-question-of-safety/

The topic of safety same up Wednesday as well in a talk by Augustine committee member Jeff Greason at the International Symposium for Personal and Commercial Spaceflight in New Mexico. In the Q&A session after his speech, he was asked why the committee didn't endorse Constellation as the "most viable" option "even though from a safety and mission assurance standpoint it's clearly the best option." Greason said that safety and mission assurance was considered by the Augustine committee, but that goes beyond simply the choice of launch vehicles.

"Launch is a relatively small contributor to the safety and mission assurance" of human missions to the Moon and beyond. "It is not negligible, it is not something you want to forget about, but it does not dominate the loss of crew probabilities." Therefore, he said, it was a mistake to focus on further increasing the reliability of a relatively small aspect of overall mission risk, particularly if those choices lead you to take out safety systems in other components that because of mass restrictions. "These are false economies in terms of safety and mission assurance."

Greason was also skeptical about the probabilistic risk assessments used to estimate the safety of various proposed systems. Most launch failures are not from random types of events, he said, but instead failures of design, testing, procedure, and the like. "If it was built wrong, it doesn't work a lot of the time, no matter what you thought the probabilistic failure was." The only way to "buy down" those failures, he said, is though flight experience, which is why "real boosters" have lower reliabilities than estimated when they were "paper boosters" still in the design phase.

"And the truth is, Ares 1 is, right now, a paper booster," Greason continued. "And the further truth is, its projected launch rate is extremely low, so it will never get out of 'infant mortality,'" that initial phase of non-probabilistic failures. "Even if Ares 1 were built exactly as planned, we would never find out whether its mature probabilistic risk assessment was or was not achievable as planned, because we would never get through the phase of life where we're supposed to work out all the teething problems."

Oh geeze, I knew I shouldn't have waited to submit a story on this, as the Guardian article linked is pretty crappy, which isn't a surprise considering how opposed the Guardian usually is to manned spaceflight in general. It doesn't even list the options the Committee is presenting to the White House. Here's some better sources:

The actual presentations from the meeting: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/meetings/08_12_meeting.html
http://www.space.com/news/090812-nasa-spaceflight-options-refined.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/13/AR2009081302244.html
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/08/13/show-exploration-the-money/

Basically, the Augustine Committee concluded that you can't do too much with the $10B budget spaceflight currently has, but a number of interesting options open up if you increase that by $3B. Basically, there's two main types of scenarios which have been outlined:

• Lunar focus: Similar to the current plan, focusing on lunar exploration and settlement with a mind towards future Mars exploration
• Deep space: Exploration of Lagrange points, near-earth asteroids, and Phobos, with an emphasis on building the in-space infrastructure which will make it easier to explore the Moon and Mars

Some items of interest regarding both scenarios:

• Most of the scenarios don't include the Ares I, which suggests that the problem-ridden program is quite likely to be cancelled
• Just about all the scenarios will have a big boost to commercial spaceflight to low-earth orbit, with the goal of making commercial providers the primary way to get to LEO by 2016
• Most of the scenarios place an emphasis on in-orbit refueling, which is something the previous administration avoided for some fairly dodgy reasons. Refueling is a major enabler when it comes to spaceflight, and helps you do a lot more with existing boosters. It also provides a market for promoting the growth and cost-efficiency of new rockets.
• Most of the options include restoring technology development funding at NASA, which was largely scrapped to help pay for the Ares I development

The accepted submission on this story was pretty good, although here's the one I wrote up, which has a few more relevant links. In particular, the first link, to an article by Alan Boyle on MSNBC, is probably the best summary of this I've seen so far:

NASA Begins Commercial Crew Initiative

NASA is using an initial $50M to 'stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate human spaceflight capabilities.' NASA originally planned to use $150M, which was blocked by Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL) until it was largely redirected to the ~$35B Ares rocket program based at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center. The Commercial Crew and Cargo Program Office (C3PO) will reward multiple competitive contracts, with the goals of promoting job growth, lowering the cost of spaceflight, and helping reduce the post-Shuttle gap in US human spaceflight capability.

Seriously, use it to stimulate PRIVATE innovation and investment, instead of trying to manually command-and-control the economy. The government can't do, or direct people to do, things with half the efficiency that entrepreneurs can.

Ideally, yes. Unfortunately, the problem from a political standpoint is that because the money goes to whoever does the best job instead of whoever lives in a particular congressional district, this is a really difficult thing to do -- that's why this prize is only $1.5 million, which is basically a rounding error when it comes to federal budgets. For example, recently NASA wanted to use $150 million of its stimulus funding to stimulate commercial spaceflight. Senator Richard Shelby (R-Al) put up a fuss and blocked NASA's overall stimulus funding until they diverted that money to the (diseased and broken) Ares I rocket program based in his state.

http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/07/03/shelby-wins-battle-on-stimulus-funding/
http://commercialspacegateway.com/item/21342-a-brief-history-review-for-sen
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2009/07/sen_shelby_gets.html

True - the NASA budget is about 1/20th what our total military expenditures are if you leave out the ongoing operational costs that are not in the primary budget. http://throb.typepad.com/special/2004%20US%20Budget.jpg

Most Americans also believe we should increase spending on NASA.
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2007/01/10/bad-and-good-news-about-public-support-for-space/

If we spent as much on space exploration as we did on the military or on bank bailouts for just one year we would have an endowment capable of funding permanent bases on the moon and robotic development of Mars.

Obama: cut Constellation to pay for education
November 20, 2007
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2007/11/20/obama-cut-constellation-to-pay-for-education/

The consistently weird thing about Obama is that all of the very worst predictions about him keep coming true [Bill Clinton, for instance, was far more inconsistent in his politics] - Obama really does subscribe to this tribalistic, Bolshevik form of Mugabeism - he really is a true believer.

NASA administrator Mike Griffin blamed the White House, and the previous Bush administration, saying funding for Ares V and other projects fell from $4bn through 2015 to just $500m.

It doesn't mention it in the summary, but people need to keep in mind that figure's only for the Ares V, which is supposed to be building on the Ares I. The GAO (which is certainly historically better in its cost estimates than NASA) has estimated that the Ares I and Orion capsule will cost more along the lines of $40-50 billion.

For comparison, funding SpaceX to finish developing commercial crew transport to the space station would cost $500 million. SpaceX would need to have a 100x cost overrun to cost as much as the Ares program.

http://www.spacepolitics.com/2007/11/20/obama-cut-constellation-to-pay-for-education/

The plan is to "delay" the constellation program in order to fund education. The claim is this is a "temporary delay", however, the way government funding works it is fairly likely that allocation would become permanent.

From what I could find, Obama only plans to cut the Constellaton program, which is Bush's plan to send people to Mars (I guess to search for oil or terrorists). He has stated he supports funding other programs (see spacepolitics.com for examples).

Obama wants to slow the space program down to spend it on welfare.

Education, actually.

It's one thing to be critical of decreasing space program funding to pay for math & science education, it's another thing to imply that the funding will be diverted to handouts.

Your connection of declining intelligence to liberals is nothing more than a fanciful leap of logic.

I* am not saying that "Liberals" cause stupidity.

I am saying, however, that their disinterest in "technological" issues [vis-a-vis their obsession with "social" issues], as evidenced by their performance in our current Congress, does reflect the underlying stupidity of their constituencies.

[Parenthetically: Were you aware that Obama wants to defund NASA's next generation of launch vehicles so as to be able to throw even more booty at his constituents in the National "Education" Association?]

*On the other hand, in his original work on the subject, Charles Murray did take the point of view that "Liberal" social policies have a dysgenic effect: If our government taxes the lives & behaviors of smart, industrious people, and subsidizes the lives & behaviors of lazy, stupid people, then we shouldn't be surprised when smart, industrious people come to have more and more difficulty in finding the time & financial resources necessary to make & raise babies, and that neither should we be surprised if lazy, stupid people are more than happy to move in and occupy that nature-abhorred vacuum.

[Again, parenthetically: Did you know that the bottom 50% of Americans pay no income taxes whatsoever? Or that the top 1% of Americans pay more income tax than the bottom 90%? Or that the average low-skilled citizen costs the government more than $19,500 per year every year of his life?]

Now I agree with Murray that the financial aspects of government social policy can impart some inertia in the general direction of fertility rates [be those rates dysgenic or eugenic], but I don't think for a second that the fiscal burden of "Liberalism" is the primary culprit here: There is something far more evil at work in the Death of the Civilized World, and "Liberalism" is merely a very poor, rather dim shadow of that Evil.

A shadow of A Shadow, if you will.

As I mention in my other post, I heavily favor using existing commercial launchers over developing new launch infrastructure. The Ares V is still useful because nothing comes close, but the same can't really be said for the Ares I.

Looking at the consolidation of the two rocket lines (the Delta IV and Atlas V variants) that can come close to the Ares I, I see that they've been consolidated into a single monopoly, the United Launch Alliance or ULA. That's not a sign of health. My take is that it's much more valuable to create genuine competitive in the commercial manned launch market (and prevent yet another economic disaster in the US space launch capacity) than to build the Ares I or for that matter to send expeditions to the Moon and Mars. Let us recall that development of launch infrastructure is higher up in NASA's charter than conducting space science or manned expeditions.

I consider the Ares I and V to "homebrew" in several ways. First, given their low launch frequency, they will be expensive. The Ares V is scheduled to launch 3-4 times a year while the Ares I sounds like it'll launch maybe 6-12 times per year (I really don't know, this unsubstantiated blurb indicates 10 launches per year over 2020-2025). The Ares I uses a 5 segmented sold rocket booster which to my knowledge is not a fantastically reliable and cost efficient design, but an untested redesign of the very reliable SRBs used on the Space Shuttle. Given ten launches a year, it won't be cost efficient either. By definition.

And ten launches a year would go a long ways to sustaining the US space launch industry in this region. Even if we including all existing Atlas V and Delta IV launches (of which there were apparently 5 total in 2006), that triples existing volume in this range. NASA can provide a big boost to this market now. And after the market gets more active (with both new competitors and fixed costs being divided across a larger group of launches than just the few NASA ones), then NASA can benefit from the resulting low launch costs.

The Europeans have the advantage of learning from the mistakes made by the Air Force, as well as newer technology.

Europe has never maintained a large coordinated constellation of satellites and kept them operating continuously. It took the US Air Force 2 decades to perfect the logistics of launching, operating, retiring, and renewing GPS. I don't see a new, untested, marginally funded, civilian organization having fewer problems. In my opinion Galileo is another in the line of "me too" technical projects like Concorde and the A380 doomed to failure.

It is pretty obvious that Galileo will not be viable without military participation. Because it will be used by potential adversaries the US is in the regrettable position of planning countermeasures it in time of war.

The plan is that as the launch services of SpaceX and other commercial providers matures, they'll be able to compete for commercial contracts to deliver cargo (and eventually crew) to the International Space Station. In fact, besides the Centennial Challenges competitions, this is one of the key ways NASA Head Michael Griffin is planning on fostering a commercial space industry.

From SpacePolitics, quoting a transcript of Griffin's recent announcement:

NASA has not had at its upper levels a manager or an administrator more supportive of commercial enterprise than I. We are base lining in the out years past the retirement of the shuttle, we are base lining commercial service to the station. That is the only known and knowable, at this point, market for those entrepreneurs that I have to give. We are base lining the use of that market for them and are providing, will be providing this fall a new procurement to try to stimulate that market.

That said, at the end of the day, what commercial means is, that it is not government directed. So, I can provide the incentive and I can provide the market that I have and commercial providers will either emerge or not. It is not acceptable for a publicly funded program not to have a way of meeting its mission requirements in the event that commercial operators do or don't materialize. So, the architecture that we have advanced allows NASA to meet its mission requirements, but also allows NASA to concentrate its resources on other more advanced activities if commercial providers can emerge in the next five to seven years. That is exactly our intent.

Our fondest desire would be to keep NASA on the very frontier of space activity, letting commercial provider fill in for those activities which are not frontier activities. We will be putting some money where our mouth is.

After I made the submission, I came across the following bit on Space Politics, which I think gives a better context for the competition:

Since Michael Griffin became NASA administrator a few months ago we have seen a gradual change in the agency's position on the role of commercial entities in carrying out the VSE. Griffin initially said he was open to it, but noted in early May that he did not want to get into a position where the agency had to rely on commercial contracts to carry out the vision: "I cannot put public money at risk depending on a commercial provider to be in my critical path." Last month, Griffin said he wanted to press ahead with commercial ISS resupply services--cargo initially, later extending to crews--to free up resources elsewhere.

Yesterday, though, NASA raised its commitment to commercialization even higher. Speaking at the Return to the Moon conference, NASA's Chris Shank made it very clear: "We've run the budget and we can't afford to do this with a traditional approach." A non-traditional approach, he explained, will put a far greater emphasis on commercialization, including ISS crew and cargo and perhaps other opportunities, such as purchasing launch services for the CEV. Later in the day, NASA's Brant Sponberg unveiled the agency's new Innovative Programs effort, which includes a mix of service procurements, other transaction authority, and prize competitions.

I also rather liked this bit on Clark Lindsey's RLV News:

Jim Muncy gave a brief but interesting summary yesterday of how he sees the situation with US space policy. He saw Shank's presentation as an indication that the long battle by the entrepreneurial space community to get commercial spaceflight companies welcomed as partners in space development has been won. However, winning a battle can actually mean tougher consequences than losing since now comes the challenge is to fulfill that partnership successfully.

Getting another "big idea" accepted is also making progress. Large scale space settlement must become the primary goal of the space program. No Antarctica-like outposts on the Moon but Las Vegas-es instead. Griffin, in fact, stated in testimony to Congress that human expansion into the solar system is his long term vision for space policy. However, this big idea is still foreign to many at NASA, in Congress, the press and the general public.

I enjoy some blogs, although I have to admit that the signal-to-noise ratio is pretty bad. Here's a few which I personally find interesting and read regularly. I'm a neuro, space, and robotics geek, so the list is biased as such.

* Reusable Launch Vehicle (RLV) News: The most thorough spaceflight blog around, focusing on reusable systems.
* NASA Watch: A well-known site with regular critiques of NASA.
* Free Republic: Like slashdot, but for ultra-conservatives. I sometimes like to go there to get a better understanding of what goes through the heads of people who think differently from me.
* Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log: "Quantum fluctuations in space, science, and exploration"
* Democratic Underground: The extreme left's version of Free Republic.
* Instapundit: The slashdot-equivalent of political weblogging, with a somewhat libertarian slant. Known for causing "Instalanches" on innocent web servers, analogous to "Slashdottings."
* Daily Kos: Probably the most influential liberal blog.
* Transterrestrial Musings: a libertarian space analyst who helped me understand why it's possible to be intelligent and support the war in Iraq at the same time. He sometimes posts some fantastic satires.
* theferrett's livejournal: sometimes writes some very insightful and well-composed essays
* spacexploration livejournal community: Space-related miscellany and discussion.
* politicsforum livejournal community: Sometimes has some pretty intelligent political discussion.
* robots.net: Robotics news
* Space Politics: "Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway"
* Rocket Man Blog: Rarely updated, but has very insightful and informed analysis of spaceflight and rocketry.
* Howard Lovy's NanoBot: Nanotechnology news and commentary

It's interesting to note that when Congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY) tried to introduce a bill to provide additional funding for tracking near-earth asteroids, he was mocked by some of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's aides. In general, supporting things like this (even though they're actually pretty important) is a good way to get yourself targeted for "not caring about things here on Earth."

As seen on Transterrestrial Musings, spacepolitics.com, and RLV News:

Just got this message Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace that the current legislation to assist the development of the suborbital spaceflight industry has been distorted by Senate staffers into something that will instead smother the industry in the cradle:

There is a last-minute move by some staffers in the Senate to heavily amend HR 3752. The amendments would completely change the charter of the office of commercial space transportation (AST), placing the safety of the crew and passengers on equal footing with the safety of the uninvolved public. Since that is well beyond present technology, it would effectively stop development of the industry in the U.S.. It is too late to fix the bill before the session adjourns, but not too late to stop it. If you or people you know have connections to any Senator, please ask them to put a "hold" on HR 3752. That prevents it from passing by unanimous consent. We may have less than 24 hours.

If the bill is "held" there may be opportunity to fix it in a post-election session -- but if not, we would still rather the bill die than pass with these poison-pill amendments.

If your Senator is on the Commerce Committee, that's even better: http://commerce.senate.gov/about/membership.html

Personally, I'm in favor of having the AST in charge of the safety of the uninvolved public on the ground, as the bill was originally worded. However, I think that the last-minute changes to have the same agency regulate the safety of crew and passengers (and require the corresponding mountains of paperwork) would be an excellent way to kill off the budding US space tourism industry.

MSNBC has a more in-depth article on this.