Academic

WHITE HOUSE: The New Moon Mission Is Canceled. Plus, Rand Simberg: We Haven?t Lost The Moon. ?

By Glenn Reynolds

WHITE HOUSE: The New Moon Mission Is Canceled.

Plus, Rand Simberg: We Haven’t Lost The Moon. My take: Given all the money he’s pissed away, it’s ridiculous for Obama to present this as a big savings. On the other hand, the program was a mess anyway, and needed to be cancelled for non-budgetary reasons. But will Obama back other means of promoting space exploration? My own guess is that he’s actually hostile too space, regardless of budget priorities, but who knows? If the rumored shift to commercial flight becomes a reality it’ll be a step forward, not a step back.

UPDATE: More from Rand Simberg. “Short version, human spaceflight policy is one of the few things that Obama seems to be getting right, at least from a conservative standpoint.”

And from Jim Bennett in the comments: “What I fear most about the new regime is that the commercial providers will be reviewed by the same agency that has an organizational incentive to see it fail so that they can revert to being a designer and operator. This approach very much wants an organizationally separate engineering analysis capability and safety authority with no ambitions to compete with the companies it supervises.”

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on January 29, 2010 (boomark / email).