On April 2nd the Orlando Sentinel reported that, "The cost of getting NASA's next-generation rocket to the international space station has ballooned from an initial $28 billion to about $44 billion today — and that number is likely to keep rising, according to NASA studies and government officials." (Full article)

Constellation has become the gift that keeps on taking. If only it could be re-gifted.

At the Space Foundation's National Space Symposium (March 30 - April 2 in Colorado Springs), some aerospace leaders dropped all lofty pretense about our national human space exploration program by reducing it to a "Save our jobs" plea and warning of the potential loss of up to 10,000 jobs unless the Constellation program is accelerated. So much for space exploration being about science, knowledge, and the settlement and economic development of our solar system.

A few thoughts about this:

• At its most fundamental level, how is this plea different from General Motors' request for a government bailout?
• Note that the emphasis was on saving jobs vs. creating jobs, on saving a moribund industry (traditional aerospace) vs. investing in a vibrant and growing industry (NewSpace). How is this different from spending money to save the moribund auto industry vs. investing in growth industries?
• When NASA's mission was to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon, it overcame tremendous managerial and technical hurdles and the loss of three astronauts in the Apollo 1 fire to succeed brilliantly. Ever since NASA's mission became one of saving jobs, it has been overcome by managerial and technical problems and suffered the loss of 14 astronauts on the Challenger and Columbia. The harsh lesson is that government human space exploration cannot break out of Earth orbit when its underlying reason for attempting it is to provide jobs below Earth orbit. These are utterly different goals with utterly different stake holders, and each requires different leadership, management, strategies, and tactics.

If NASA's Constellation program was depicted as a constellation of stars in the sky, what would it look like?