Space Access Society: "Time Running Out for NASA Reform"

The latest message from Henry Vanderbilt at the Space Access Society:

Time Running Out for NASA Reform

The proposed new NASA space exploration policy looks as promising as anything we've seen come from those quarters for a long time. These reforms pass responsibility for basic space access to the US commercial sector, while refocusing NASA away from their ruinously inefficient in-house rocket development bureaucracy and back toward developing new technologies for future transportation and deep-space exploration. The new policy has potential to radically reduce the costs of basic orbital access, of routine space operations, and of deeper exploration too, vastly expanding our space development and future exploration possibilities.

But it's a long way from a promising new policy to a successful program. First the Congress gets to decide what will and will not actually get funded each year. This process is already well on its way to running off the rails, with the House in particular on course to gut new NASA R&D in order to send 92% of NASA's Exploration budget to the same old failed in-House NASA vehicle development projects. (These NASA vehicle projects have in recent years cost ten or more times as much as US ...