I haven't read the whole report yet, so maybe this is in there somewhere, but in this piece from the Gray Lady, it's clear that the admiral was willing to go further than William Rogers did after Challenger:

"We are challenging the government of the United States" to make up its mind, Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr., the commission's chairman, said yesterday, alluding to the ease with which politicians hail the shuttle program while cutting its budget by 40 percent.

"We need to decide as a nation what we want to do," Admiral Gehman, who is retired, warned. The solution, he said, was not just a modernized shuttle. "We shouldn't start by designing the next vehicle," he said. "That is a trap that we've fallen into several times."

The challenge places President Bush in essentially the same place President Ronald Reagan was after the Challenger explosion. Confronting a $480 billion budget deficit this year and many more years of deficits to follow, does Mr. Bush want to commit to expending the money and energy needed to remake the nation's space program, the step the commission said was critical to averting a third disaster? Or do problems on earth, like bringing order and democracy to Iraq, battling terrorism or rebuilding another aging technological behemoth ? the electric power grid ? rank higher?

Look, folks. It's not about money. We're spending about one percent of the federal budget on space. We're spending much more on agricultural supports that are starving millions in the Third World. The issue is not how much to spend, but how to spend it.

Do we want a space program that is a jobs program for politically correct engineers, or do we want a space program that actually accomplishes something in space? If so, what are we trying to accomplish?

It's time to write your congressman and senators, and say, not I want to send astronauts to Mars, or I want to send astronauts to the Moon, but I want my children to be able to go into space, and I want to see a payoff from space, in new resources, and energy, and political freedom. And I want to go into space myself, and it's none of your damned business why I want to go, any more than one had to fill out a form in the seventeenth century to explain why one wanted to go to America from Europe. I want a debate on the purposes of why we're spending money on NASA, and I'm tired of the space program being used as an excuse for jobs in the right congressional districts, or foreign aid to countries that don't act like allies, with no attention being paid to any actual accomplishments in space.

I don't know if it will do any good, but if it doesn't now, it never will.

This makes tons of sense. Almost more worth writing this kind of letter than the one about the Pluto/Kuiper mission I promoted on my blog a few days ago.

"Do we want a space program that is a jobs program for politically correct engineers, or do we want a space program that actually accomplishes something in space?"

My vote is with you. So what are the political realities and what CAN be accomplished?

I think it's correct that the current funding levels are sustainable and generally supported by the public. It certainly could be spent better.

Perhaps with two shuttles down we have a crack in the door that will allow for policy changes, but what policy? It has to be simple minded enough for a congress criter to get behind, while keeping in mind that their only interest in space is how much money it brings into their districts.

Perhaps the best way would be to target those politicians with private space ventures in their districts with the intent of loosening up funding for more x-prizes?

I'm British and see a significant similarity betweent the problems faced by NASA and our own National Health Service. The underlying problem is that NASA is wearing too many incompatible hats. It determines policy, purchases the goods and services it needs and (for the most part) delivers those services itself (with a vast chunk getting sub-contracted to provate industry). NASA is its own supplier, its own customer, its own judge. Hence the bullshit of 'we need the shuttle to keep the ISS alive' going hand in hand with 'the ISS is needed to justify the shuttle programme'. You get programmes for programme's sake.

I think a clear break should be made between an organisation that determines (or at least proposes) space policy for the government and receives funding for the same versus anyone else involved in actually supplying and delivering those needs.

This clear split would force a new NASA (now just a policy making and space goods / services purchasing body) to be explicitly clear about what it was getting and why. The majority of current NASA staff would, of course, fall on the other side of the divide and have to compete and deliver what a new NASA contracted for. There is no reason that the supply / delivery side of NASA could not be privatised. All programme management, R&D, vehicle build, flight ops, etc could be managed as commercial ventures. Even allowing for contractor profit this would be alot cheaper and more effective for the taxpayer as most of the redundant functions and self serving programmes would just go.

I contend that such a NASA could purchase a manned Mars mission within its current budget.

At that news conference, Gehman also made it clear that the board believes that the nation, when it makes up its mind, should opt for developing cheap, easy and reliable ways to get people to LEO. Note that he did not establish an objective in terms of a target or destination.

This makes much good sense. Human travel to other destinations in space should begin in LEO, not on Earth's surface. Space stations would have real jobs -- assembling, maintaining and launching spacecraft -- rather than just politically driven makework. Meanwhile, all the problems surrounding a launch from Earth and re-entry from LEO need only be solved once, for one class of vehicle.

There's a reason why we build shipyards on the coast. We should be building a spaceyard in LEO and commuting to it.

If I were a member of Congress and had recieved Rand's hypothetical letter, I should be excused for being a bit confused. There is a lot of things in it that are opposed. (Thou shalt not send people to the Moon or Mars. Thou shalt not do anything that might benefit my district or state.) But there doesn't seem to be any positive policy suggestions.

IMO as a NASA semi-insider (I work at JPL) the problem with turning NASA into a policy-making and procurement organization is that it won't actually change anything because space is still too rarified a market. NASA will effectively be the only customer, at least for a long time. The fundamental dynamics of who calls the shots and what shots they call won't change. All that will change is the kind of paperwork they (we) will be filling out.

IMO2 (just as a private citizen this time) the government is certainly an obstacle to the privatization of space, but it's not the only obstacle, and it's probably not even the main obstacle. The fundamental problem with privatizing space is that it's a hell of a lot harder to get into space than it is to get into the air, and the benefits are far less clear, so it's a lot harder to build a business case for it.

>I want my children to be able to go into space, and I want to see a payoff from space, in new resources, and energy, and political freedom. And I want to go into space myself

I want all those things too. But to get them we'll need more than clamoring for them. We'll need coherent plans on how these things will be achieved.

> I'm tired of the space program being used as an excuse for jobs in the right congressional districts, or foreign aid to countries that don't act like allies, with no attention being paid to any actual accomplishments in space

But this is a red herring. You point out yourself that the amount of money being spent on NASA is minscule. NASA is at worst irrelevant, and at best a way to maintain the knowledge of space technology alive until someone can figure out a way to make more effective use of it.

I think the real problem you have to overcome is this attitude that safety trumps everything else. The cost of safety increases exponentially as the risk approaches (but never actually reaches) zero. As long as safety is valued above all else you will never make it into space because the most cost-effective way to insure that no one dies in space is to stay on the ground. But this is not a NASA problem, this is a societal problem; NASA is just a reflection of society's attitude as a whole towards risk. You won't change that by writing a letter to your Congressman. But if you want to privatize space you have to change it. Zero-tolerance of risk is a show-stopper for any business venture.