FYI,

"NASA Pundits Launch Debate Over Space Flight"
CNET News.com
http://www.news.com/NASA-pundits-launch-debate-over-space-flight/2100-
11397_3-6209299.html

: At the 50th anniversary space conference here Thursday, a fight
: over the future role of NASA's space program inadvertently took
: off.

: If it were up to Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer known for
: building a suborbital rocket plane that won the Ansari X Prize,
: NASA wouldn't be developing a spacecraft to put another man on the
: moon by 2020. That government mission has already been
: accomplished, and a repeat performance is "silly," Rutan said
: during a panel held at California Institute of Technology, CalTech,
: which runs NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab.

: "Taxpayer-funded NASA should only fund research and not
: development," Rutan said. "When you spend hundreds of billions of
: dollars to build a manned spacecraft, you're...dumbing down a
: generation of new, young engineers (by telling them) "No, you can't
: take new approaches, you have to use this old technology."

: "I think it's absurd they're doing Orion development at all. It
: should be done commercially," he said, referring to the name of the
: lunar spacecraft.

: NASA Administrator Michael Griffin responded to Rutan's vision in a
: speech following his panel. "Unlike Rutan, I will continue to think
: space programs are important," Griffin said.

: Of course, Rutan has a big stake in commercial development of
: spacecraft. As founder and president of Scaled Composites, he
: develops rockets for future commercial space tourism. Rutan is
: among a cadre of technology entrepreneurs, including Amazon founder
: Jeff Bezos, Paypal co-founder Elon Musk and Virgin CEO Richard
: Branson, who are working on ventures to send people into space.

: In his speech, Griffin talked about NASA's budget for the last
: 50 years, adjusted for inflation. He said that the most money NASA
: has ever received from the government was not the period during the
: Apollo missions, but over the 10 years from 1989 to 1998. "So we
: get more money today than (what was) given the agency during
: Apollo" (during the 1960s and 1970s.) NASA's budget for 2007 is
: $14 billion, or about 15 cents a day of a taxpayer's money,
: according to Griffin.

: Part of Rutan's argument against NASA's development program was
: that after the early 1970s, when astronaut Alan Shepard golfed on
: the moon, there wasn't "much innovation."

: Griffin didn't respond directly to whether or not there is a lack
: of innovation. But in response to criticism on an earlier panel
: that NASA's science budget has waned, he said the first decade of
: NASA's budget was proportionally the same as its most recent
: budget. During the first 10 years of the space agency, he further
: clarified, 58 percent of its budget was devoted to human
: spaceflight, 17 percent to science, 6 percent to aerospace and
: 10 percent to new technologies. In contrast, in 2006, 62 percent of
: NASA's budget was earmarked for spaceflight and 32 percent was for
: space science, he said. Last year, NASA didn't have a budget to
: develop new technologies.

: "There is a mythology that science has been decimated by human
: spaceflight. That's not right." Griffin said.

: He added that the current missions back to the moon and onto Mars
: by 2035 are sustainable programs, ones that wouldn't likely be
: stemmed by a change in administrations.

: "We have here a program which is affordable, sustainable and which
: can be highly correlated to historical successes and developments
: from the past," said Griffin.

: Rutan said that the goal of private space tourism is to reduce the
: cost of space travel and exploration. "If we go through a time
: period where the focus is on flying the consumer, these 'payloads'
: who pay to fly and can be reproduced with unskilled labor...with
: tools around the house," he joked, "there will be a breakthrough to
: enormous volume."

Mark Reiff