Paul F. Dietz wrote:
Tom Cuddihy wrote:

Actually, Scott, his ideology doesn't have any bearing on why he's
wrong. His pessimism about the worth of big, government funded
exploration is just as faith based as your own belief in how important
it is.

So tell me, Tom -- what do you expect ESAS to lead to? Make a case
here.

I don't know what percentage of man's future in space will in the
future be attributable to ESAS, and what will just develop as a natural
consequence of improving technology and the already improving space
market. ($20 mil a pop for orbital one-week trips. Not bad.)
Maybe historians will argue about it a hundred years from now. Because
I can't predict the future. Neither can anyone else.

It's often tough to tell just where technology and the marketplace is
going in the next 3 or 4 years. If I was good at this I would have
invested everything I owned into Amazon.com's IPO and then pulled it
all out in 2000. If you could predict the future so would have you.

But you have to start somewhere. ESAS is what you call a 'baseline.'
It's the fallback. If all the other budding space projects fall through
completely, if SpaceX stalls after launching one or two Falcon 1s, if
all of AirLaunch's test engines blow up and Blue Origin kills a family
of 5 on their first suborbital joy ride, at least the ESAS will still
be in progress, keeping the public interested in man's outward destiny,
keeping at least a cadre of personnel knowledgeable in the issues of
manned space launch, hopefully beyond LEO.

I take as proof #1 that NASA is not designing ESAS as a way to keep the
commercial market out of the business:

http://www.space.com/spacenews/busin...ay_051107.html

Don't forget Ferdinand and Isabella sent Columbus out to the Spice
Islands by sailing west in 1492. Magellan finally got there in 1522,
the point being not that the first CEV returning from Aitken basin will
be full of expensive spices but that you don't know which way the wind
blows when you get over the horizon--until you go check it out. I think
that's worth the risk of the whole thing 'leading nowhere'

It's up to those spending twelve figure budgets to do that,
not for critics to prove them wrong. It's particularly important
for the rah-rah crowd to make their case when the historical
record points to the opposite conclusion -- that manned space
programs don't return much, and don't fulfill the breathless
predictions of their advocates. Skepticism here is *evidence*
based, not faith based. We've been fooled enough, and this new
scheme has all the hallmarks of another con.

What 'hallmarks of a con' does ESAS contain? What is it selling itself
as that you think is grossly innacurate or inappropriate?

Tom



Paul