Rand Simberg's much announced New Atlantis article
is now up and it is very long and exhaustive indeed. It contains a lot of Rand's dubious opinions (Apollo was a dead end. We can go back to the Moon with rockets now commercially available, Mike Griffin was pernicious in his term as NASA administrator.) The article also has a lot of vague, unsupported, and often silly statements, such as my favorite toward the end:
Let us finally abandon our race with the Soviet Union, the race we won four decades ago against an adversary two decades vanquished and vanished. We don’t need to remake Apollo; we need to open up the new space frontier the way the old American frontier was opened.
Aside from the fact that we abandoned the race with the Soviets by curtailing Apollo from almost the moment Apollo 11 returned, Rand seems to forget that the opening of the American frontier, from Columbus on, was informed by national rivalries. Rand should learn a little history before he undertakes to cite it.
The fundamental flaw in Rand's article is his idea that NASA needs to "build infrastructure" to facilitate the entry of commercial players in space. NASA tried that with the space shuttle, and we know how that turned out. The lesson learned, contrary to what Rand suggests, is not that re usability is impossible (though the shuttle was never so much reusable as it was salvageable), but rather that the government doesn't need to be in the space line business.
Rand seems to get this in another part of the article when he calls for an expansion of COTS to not just ISS servicing to exploration in general. A nice sounding idea, until one considers the difficulty raising money to build--say--a Moon rocket for a expedition not scheduled for about a decade for a program that might, at any moment, be changed or curtailed by the politicians. COTS will not work in the real world unless there is a concrete commitment from the government that investors can believe in. For the current COTS it is ISS. For a lunar COTS (something I suggested five years ago) it would be a lunar base already established.
A better idea might be something that has been often proposed and that might be a NASA DARPA, which would do nothing but developer technology. This organization would also sponsor prize competitions and would help commercial entities in their own technology endeavors.
Rand's next fallacy is his charge that the Constellation program was "not sustainable" in a budget sense. Here he demonstrates a lack of understanding of how government budgeting works and how it has not worked for Constellation. NASA was given a budget for Constellation that seemed reasonable, but was then cut in the out years. There's about a five to six billion dollar shortfall between what NASA was promised and what it got.
One of the issues that the Augustine Commission is wrestling with is the idea that the government needs to pay for what it proposes to get. One can plan out the most "sustainable" program one can imagine, but can suddenly become less sustainable if politicians cut its funding at an unforeseen whim.
Rand finally harps on some of the technical problems that the Ares 1 is undergoing. The problem is that every new development program, especially rockets, undergoes technical challenges. That is true of a big government funded Ares or the entrepreneurial Falcon series. It leads to the one maxim that people ought to learn and accept, "It always costs more. It always takes longer."
Learn it. Live it. Love it.
Addendum: John Kavanagh in a comment on Rand's
blog posting reminds me of another phony historical reference Rand uses to attack heavy lift rockets.
Consider a thought experiment from an earlier frontier. Imagine that, on the settlers’ hard trek to the western United States, there had been no vegetation along the way for the wagon-pulling horses or oxen to eat. To get across the country, each Conestoga would have to carry enough hay to feed the animals (not to mention supplies for the pioneers for months). The wagon would have been so large that the animals wouldn’t have been able to pull it. The longest distance that could be traveled would be dictated by the largest size of wagon that they could pull when it was full, and the initial speed would be very slow, picking up as the wagon grew lighter. Once the final destination was attained, the wagon and the animals would be useless without more fuel, so presumably the wagon parts would be used to build a cabin or saloon. In reality, of course, such a system would never have been affordable; had the settlers not been able to avail themselves of food and water along the way, the West would never have been settled.
Leaving aside that most people who settled the American West took the train, the analogy that more closely relates to space ships are sailing ships. The development of ships tended toward larger sizes, especially those that crossed the Atlantic. From Viking long ships, to Caravel, to the Galleon, the trend was to build bigger, the better to transport people and material to the New World.
Using Rand's logic, we would have stuck with long ships and tried to get to the New World by fishing along the way. It should be noted that the Viking settlement of the New World failed, whereas the later Europeans, with larger and more capable ships, succeeded.
Mind, fuel depots are a great idea, but as a capability multiplier and not as a substitute for large rockets.
Of course my fantasy is that someone solves the problem of nuclear explosions causing fallout and EMP bursts and we are thus able to build proper Orion space craft, the ones that would have been lofted by nuclear bombs and could carry crews in the hundreds.
by Rod Pyle and 
by Jim Bell 