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HobbySpace links to, and expands on, James Oberg's “Bringing space costs back down to Earth”. The Artemis Society's cost estimates for a for-profit mission put a lunar base at $1.42 billion.

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From FloridaToday.com comes the article Space plan not a done deal which has this to say:

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One of NASA's human space flight planners, Wendell Mendell of Johnson Space Center, told Florida Today that one important solution is showing progress – showing achievements are being made for the money spent. He compared it to how Europeans built great cathedrals over many generations.

“While you're building the cathedral, people have to see things that actually happen so they can relate to the cathedral,” Mendell said.“So whatever the plan is, whatever you come up with, whatever NASA agrees to, whatever the president says, it ought to have built into it something that the public can see that's tangible, about every three to five years, something that happens that people are proud of that they've accomplished.”

Well, call me naive, but give me a bazaar any day of the week.

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Frank Sietzen Jr. (UPI) and Keith L. Cowing (NasaWatch) have been working on a three part series (one, two, and three) that details the history and reasoning behind the President's new space policy. The series is interesting and will give you a good idea of how policy is made (think sausage).

The third article gets into what I thought was particular interesting: the role of private enterprise. If Frank and Keith's characterization is accurate then maybe the administration did recognize that industry is capable of offering economical and profitable solutions. Read for yourself:

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The commercial industry could be a different story, however. Aerospace companies might be able to supply small communications satellites orbiting the moon, for example, keeping landing parties in touch with Earth, even if they traveled to the moon's far side. In fact, the issue of how to leverage commercial space entrepreneurs or companies – even universities – into a new attempt at moon landings was taken seriously.

Potential private partners could contribute in various ways. A Global Positioning System or GPS satellite system in lunar orbit could guide all incoming craft to precision lunar landings. If operational, such a system could allow smaller space vehicles with crews to land near cargos previously dropped down from orbit nearby. In that way, mission planners could simplify the complexity of the moon lander's electronics, keeping costs down.

The navigational approach would allow somewhat smaller ships to be built, because more accurate positioning cuts down on fuel requirements and hence size. Smaller spacecraft need smaller rockets – and existing space launchers could be procured from existing launch companies in place of the massive, Saturn-type rockets used during the Apollo landings of the 1960s and '70s.

The lunar GPS idea also could be applied to Mars exploration. Indeed, NASA's current plans for missions to the red planet include the Mars Telecommunications Orbiter. Scheduled for launch in 2009, the MTO will act as the telecommunications center for missions to the red planet for years to come. It would seem an ideal candidate for navigational data relays as well.

As mentioned below, perhaps this portion of the overall policy will have a more direct impact on the non-NASA portions of the government's space related departments.

This policy shift, coupled with the fact that the 'private space' meme is propagating:

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Economist: America's space programme

New York Times: The Citizen Astronaut

The Age: Moon Inc: canny move or sheer lunacy?

The Australian: Over the moon (is everyone channelling Ben Bova today?)

Space Today: Private investment to pay for refurbished Baikonur launch pad

could mean that things will begin moving rather quickly. I could be projecting but some of the things that have been happing lately are starting to give me that feeling again.

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It seems a few outlets are picking up Rick's latest. One thing that this release made me think about was that all of the material we've been seeing so far is strictly about NASA: NASA budgets, NASA reorganizations, NASA goals, etc. But that can't be the limitation of where the President's 'vision thang' stops, can it? Given that the President made it clear that the DoD would be playing a much larger role in this new vision, I can't imagine that he's going to leave the other space related policies untouched. Specifically, what changes will there be to AST, the Commerce Department, NOAA, etc. Maybe the answer to Rick's question won't be something that's part of NASA's mission, but a combination of missions given across the government. I'm not going to hold my breath, but it will be interesting to see how the President's vision will affect other government agencies.

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After reading Blake Powers' The “New” Space Initiative and comments from Dan (Happy Fun Pundit) in this thread on Transterrestrial Musings, I think that this might end up being a little better than the hype yesterday suggested.

As in many things political, the truth is never in the rhetoric, but in the actual documents. The image to the right is from the PDF that contains details on the actual budgeting. Notice that there is no money for launch vehicle development. You could speculate that it would be lumped in with the CEV budget but that isn't large enough to fund both a lunar lander and a launch system. Plus, all of the plans suggest that this thing will be an 'Apollo' style 'capsule on a stack', which means it should go on anything with large lift capabilities.

Which, to my eyes, looks like a potential win for the likes of SpaceX and Kistler Aerospace. As well as a kick in the teeth wrapped with a little vindication to Andrew Beal. But, as with all things NASA, the entire vision can be scuttled by midlevel engineers intent on protecting their fiefdoms. I sure hope Mr. Okeefe uses this opportunity to clean house.

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The Ask The Whitehouse 'online interactive forum' (no its not chat, you just get your questions answered with no chance to follow up) will have Dr. John Grunsfeld (NASA Chief Scientist and Astronaut) on at 5:00 today to discuss “US Space Policy”. Perhaps this is a way to get answers to real questions. You can submit a question here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/ask/question.html

Update: Apparently very few questions were answered. According to this note from the moderator:

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Dr. Grunsfeld had to leave but indicated he wanted to answer more of your questions. We have forwarded questions to him and once he replies, we will post them on the site. Check back tomorrow for more answers.

we should check back tomorrow.

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In Beyond the Moon: Inside Bush's space plan Sietzen and Cowing divulge who made up the team that produced what President Bush talked about yesterday. Quoting directly, emphasis added is mine:

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Late in the spring, O'Keefe spoke with Cheney and Bolton about how to proceed. The decision was to seek additional perspectives. In early June, they brought in John Marburger, the president's science adviser, to the discussions. Soon others joined, from agencies such as the Department of Defense and the State Department.

At one time or another, Richard Russell and Brett Alexander from the Office of Science and Technology Policy; Gil Klinger from the National Security Council; Mary Kicza, NASA's associate administrator for biological and physical research; John Schumacher, its chief of staff; Steve Isakowitz, its comptroller; Paul Pastorek, general counsel; and, Gary Martin, the agency's space architect, all participated in the discussions – including some at the White House.

The group also consulted at least two outside space experts.

This explains a lot. My suspicion is that even the two experts were supporters of NASA and government programs. But as Andrew Case says in this thread:

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NASA now has a concrete goal, something to get the various internal interest groups in line. Everyone will try to use this to advance their pet project, but the goals and budget are limited enough that most of them will be told to take a number. Most important is that this won't tread on the toes of entrepreneurs, since the only new vehicle being developed is the CEV, and the entrepreneurs are either developing orbital boosters (for which CEV could potentially be a customer), or working on suborbital vehicles (which NASA doesn't even notice).

This could have been a lot worse, and may even turn out to be quite good.

Yes, it could have been a lot worse. So I'm going to stop bitching about it and happily ignore most of it. The timelines are so long anyway. I even think that my expectations for something more ambitious were nothing more than my own desires for a 'silver bullet' to make things easy. Its an easy trap to fall into.

In other words, the show's over. Back to the slog and the grind….

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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:

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* 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.

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Rand Simberg is doing a much better job at responding to some of the more inane commentary on the upcoming space pronouncements. Here are my favorites:

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To The Moon, Alice

A Cowboy Space Program?

Mission Worth It?

RTWT, especially the comments…

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The POTUS' speech will be at 3:00 EST on CSPAN for those who want to watch it online.

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