'A' Vehicle? Astronauts As 'Space Entrepreneurs'? I'm Disappointed

01/14/04 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

Now that I have more details I'm not all that impressed. The fact that the President used the term “space entrepreneur” to refer to NASA astronauts when there are real space ones suggests that the commission probably didn't have much input concerning other methods.

While that nit is stylistic, my major one was with the fact that NASA is going to be charged with developing 'a' Crew Exploration Vehicle (CEV). Not a mention anywhere of developing infrastructure and industry. But there's so little detail that you can't really say what execution will look like. But I got the distinct impression that it was NASA or nothing. That may also be an artifact of who the audience was.

My overall impression: not the big ideas some would expect from a man who likes 'big ideas'. These are actually very old ideas. For how it might impact companies I see a brisk business for typical NASA contractors but nothing that fundamentally changes the economics of most real space entrepreneurs.

Update: So I decided to go see what kind of background material had been posted. There are some fairly simple bullet points here. One caught my eye as the only mention of commercial activity:

bq.

* Pursue commercial opportunities for providing transportation and other services supporting the International Space Station and exploration missions beyond low Earth orbit.

That's it. We'll see if the oversight committee will actually deliver on that when its been NASA's history to never pay more than lip service to that idea.