Past Perfect, Future Misleading

Rand Simberg wrote:

I have some more commentary on the Gehman report,
and why we should not build "the" next generation
launch system.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,95930,00.html

While I agree that a thriving commercial launch industry is far better
than a single government funded vehicle, I'm less in agreement that the
government should be out of the business entirely.

It seems to me (rightly or not) that the *current* state of human
space presence is more like shipbuilding than anything else. I'll leave
out the shipbuilding editorial and state only that the US government
specifically subsidizes US shipyards to keep them in business in order
to assure US shipbuilding expertise is not lost.

With no current demand for *commercial* human presence in space, there
is, correspondingly, no current demand for commercial launch vehicles.
While a significant argument can be made for the idea that there
will never be commercial demand as long as the government is in the
business, an alternative argument can be made that the government really
needs to maintain a guaranteed human access to space.

If that means a much scaled back NASA, performing pure research ONLY (no
commercial stuff - let industry spring up to satisfy that need), then
I'm all in favour of it. As long as we have guaranteed civilian access.

--buck