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The latest communique from the Space Access Society contains an interesting passage that illustrates one of the many things that is wrong with what is laughingly called "space activism."

We've been of mixed mind how actively we should oppose SLS for a while now. On the one hand, it is indisputably a huge piece of earmarked pork. Further, there's a strong likelihood that SLS will never fly at all for the proposed funding under the implicit political requirement of being managed by as much of the current NASA HSF booster establishment as can possibly be kept on the payroll. Finally, SLS's Congressional sponsors remain prone to trimming back actual useful NASA projects like Commercial Crew (fingers crossed CCP gets over their HSF-inspired micromanagement compulsion) and Space Technology Program to pay for minor plus-ups of the SLS porkfest.

Plus, attacking SLS all-out would be really, really satisfying. We'd certainly enjoy it, and we have reason to believe we'd mobilize considerable additional grass-roots support, because face it, a lot of you would enjoy it as well.

There are two boringly unsatisfying reasons why we've mostly limited ourselves to pointing out SLS's absurdities without actively trying to defund it.

Of course considering the current budget climate, the lack of leadership coming from the White House and NASA and the chaos in the Congress, it is uncertain that anything is going to fly anytime soon. Congress is getting ready to not only underfund SLS but also commercial crew. Coupled with that NASA moving to manage commercial crew the old fashioned way, and one sees shaping up another "lost decade" of American space flight, as Mike Griffin so adroitly put it.

With all of that, these people contemplating going after SLS because it would be "really, really satisfying" seems to these tired, old eyes to be the height of absurdity. Letting emotions interfere violates one of the first rules of political intrigue. Sadly too many people violate that rule.

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