I appreciate the importance of symbolism, but symbolism alone does not justify the expense of retaining the Shuttle or, God help us, developing a new man-rated launch system. And does the ability to inspire the soul provide a basis for the retention of other programs that are not as productive as they can be in these tight fiscal times? After all, I’m sure the National Endowment of the Arts and NPR can do some soul inspiring. And yet I get sneaking suspicion most on our side of the ideological spectrum would not get dewey eyed about their passing if they passed into the ash heap of history tomorrow.

Aside from it being the worst thing to ever happen to manned spaceflight, of course.

My point was not to analogize NASA with NPR and NEA. It was to analogize their proponents: If the Left responded to, say, the Spending Reduction Act that NPR and NEA should be spared the axe because they inspire the soul, most on the Right would scoff. Producing useful symbolism and fuzzy feelings ought not be sufficient to justify expenditures on the scale demanded by our current manned spaceflight regime. In many ways, if manned spaceflight’s purpose is to produce the aforementioned symbolism and fuzzy feelings, it’s little better than the ethanol boondoggle, except that there’re those on our side instead of the Left who’re willing to look beyond the squandered billions it consumes. Though such is debatable, I suppose, and reasonable folk can disagree.

As an addendum to the discussion of the Vision Thing, I would note that such presidential visions tend to do more damage to American space policy than not. Kennedy’s vision to take man to the Moon in a decade so as to win the Space Race produced the massive achievements of Apollo. In the process, it created a massively dysfunctional institutional culture that has never been able to adapt to the “lean” post-Apollo years, is earnestly yearns to “recapture” the glory days of its youth, and which killed off or crowded most of the truly sustainable launch infrastructures being pursued by NACA. NASA’s own visions of a reusable orbiter launching and returning to Earth once a week locked it into a launch platform that hasn’t put a man beyond LEO in three decades while, simultaneously, launching once every three months. Bush 43′s vision of a return to the Moon saw the death of Project Prometheus and its various subsidiary projects, which was NASA’s great hope for undertaking serious science beyond the Asteroid Belt. I prefer presidents who’ll let the agency toil in anonymity, as most of the really good ideas — e.g. Prometheus — tend to originate out of such times.

Our bottom lines, in general, are very much in alignment: The U.S. has serious interests in orbit and should take any and all steps necessary to protect them. At the moment, this is done through the USAF’s independent launch capacity and does not require man-rated craft. Should development of such be required, then the funds should be appropriated for a timely programmatic gestation post haste.

Where we quibble is over whether the U.S. should be in the game of civil manned spaceflight. I suspect here we are irreconcilably divided: You will not convince me that, in the near future, the costs in blood and treasure required to keep putting men in LEO, let alone returning to Luna or beyond Earth’s orbit, will be justified by the potential returns. Just as I suspect I could not convince you that a continued American manned spaceflight is not a vital necessity in these fiscally austere times.

Freed of the albatross of manned spaceflight — and assuming average annualized budgets hold at about where they have for the past two decades — the resources for defunct projects like JIMO, its Titan-destined sister program, and NASA’s various large spaceborne interferometer programs aimed at detecting and imaging nearby Earth-sized exoplanets. I’ve always been of the opinion that the wonderment of the cosmos would better be stoked by exploring the truly alien worlds of the outer Solar System than in putting men back on the Moon.

I never thought I’d be defending Barack Obama — especially here! — but he has never said that space is a waste. He has said, through his budgetary requests, that manned spaceflight does not justify the costs associated with the development of a new man-rated launch system. This is eminently defensible, in light of Rule #38 of Akin’s Laws of Spacecraft Design. (When keeping a new manned space program affordable and on schedule, whatever you do, do not design a new launch platform.) Both NASA and the USAF retain access to plenty of non-man-rated launch platforms, through both private vendors such as the United Launch Alliance and SpaceX, as well as the USAF’s independent launch capability.

As said elsewhere in the thread, manned spaceflight is hard: It increases the mass requirements needed for a given task by absurd ratios, mass that can better be used by unmanned systems for more mission-related payload. Given our current defense posture and space policy, shedding manned flight will allow us to pursue our respective goals more efficiently and more effectively.