I'm still too busy to write much, and it's not going to get much better until the end of the month--it will be a challenge even to do my Fox columns this week and next--but in the meantime, go read this little history of presidential space initiatives by Dwayne Day, over at The Space Review.

For those who aren't familiar with past attempts to set a new direction for NASA, it provides a lot of good guidance, and potential food for thought as to how to avoid the mistakes of that past. It also debunks the nonsense that anything that NASA does beyond LEO automatically costs four hundred billion dollars (which of course, because NASA is doing it, is automatically inflated to a trillion dollars by clueless commentators).

And by the way, congratulations to Jeff Foust on the one-year anniversary of The Space Review. It should be one of your weekly must-read links if you're interested in space policy and technology.

[Update on Wednesday]

Clark Lindsey has an email from someone at NASA who says that the SEI cost estimate was even more inflated than Dwayne says (scroll down a little).

...the internal NASA JSC number was $100 Billion -- this number was doubled by the comptroller at JSC and then doubled again by the Comptroller at NASA Headquarters.

It wouldn't surprise me at all.

[Update at 8:45 AM PST]

Dwayne responds in comments.

That article is actually something I dusted off from 1994 and updated. It originally ran in Spaceflight. I became concerned that a lot of people were discussing the failure of the Space Exploration Initiative in 1989 without really knowing what happened and why. There is not really very much written about this subject anywhere. At one point I was going to write my Ph.D. dissertation about this subject, but decided that nobody cared about failed proposals. (And to tell the truth, SEI was such a colossal failure that I'm not sure how much we can learn from it other than the importance of good staff work in support of a policy.)

The second part, which I am still working on, is much revised from the original and includes a lot more of the numbers. Part 1 only mentioned the numbers that were leaked at the time of the Bush speech in July 1989. Those numbers are from the preliminary cost estimate. NASA then conducted its infamous 90-Day Study and the numbers increased, to $541 billion. NASA's "cheap" option was $471 billion. The agency essentially started with the assumption that it would receive a massive amount of money and never made reducing costs a goal.

The costs could have been slashed significantly simply by reducing the ambitions. For instance, in 1992 NASA produced a more realistic lunar return plan known as First Lunar Outpost, which would have cost $25 billion (about half of which was for a new Saturn V class launch vehicle). And other lunar return proposals were even cheaper. Now they undoubtedly would have been more expensive than the initial estimates. But the point is that NASA's initial proposals of approximately $400 billion were not the agency's _only_ cost estimates. They are simply the only ones that critics and pundits quote nowadays. It's a classic example of where reporters try to reduce a story down to minimalist facts and end up distorting the record.

The real story is much more complex, and the real story is that even NASA thought that it could do these missions much cheaper than the original estimates. It's just that the agency did not want to.

The claim that the number was doubled by JSC and doubled again by NASA Headquarters is one that I have heard before and I believe that it is probably apocryphal. It is not a new story and in fact I contacted Michael Griffin, the first AA for Exploration at NASA about the budget numbers (Griffin was at SDIO in 1989).

Griffin said that the story was that the original number for a "robust" architecture produced by JSC was $125 billion. That number was then doubled by Truly and then doubled by OMB Director Darman on Capitol Hill (no mention of the JSC Comptroller). Supposedly they all remembered the famous story of Jim Webb doubling the Apollo cost estimate. What they did not realize was that they were doubling a figure that had already been doubled.

The problem with this claim is that I actually have the 24 page preliminary cost estimate that breaks down all the categories. So if Truly doubled the number and then Darman doubled the number, who went back and broke down all the categories to get them to add up to the new numbers? And when did they do this? It just does not make sense.

I am inclined to believe that the real inflation is in the 50% cost reserve in the July 1989 estimate. There is no detailed breakdown of costs in the November 1989 "90-Day Study" report.

So I am inclined to believe that this "double double" story is a space urban myth, not real. If the claimant can produce anything more than "everybody knew this," I will be happy to change the story. But I have a piece of paper with the numbers.

As for the "Office of Exploration" not existing in 1989, this is a misunderstanding on the writer's part. There was an Office of Exploration in 1989. Go to the back of the Ride Report ("Leadership and America's Future in Space") dated August 1987 and you will see a list of the staff for the "Office of Exploration, NASA Headquarters." I am not sure what level this office was at. Later, in 1991, NASA created an Office of Exploration with an Associate Administrator (Michael Griffin) in charge of it.

It's interesting that you point out that little has been written about it. I've googled in vain over the years for a transcript of Bush's speech. I have a recollection that he said we were going to "return to the moon, this time to stay, and then on to Mars, and settle the solar system." I never hear anyone mention the last phrase--all everyone else remembers was the moon and Mars.

Am I crazy (don't answer that--I mean is this evidence of it)? Or did he say that?

That speech should be on-line somewhere. The NASA History Office website has a collection of important space policy documents and it might be there. You might also search under a more general subject term, such as "Public Papers of the President." There is a series of GPO books under that title that reprints all major presidential speeches. But I do not know if it has gone online. (There was a good article on search engines--specifically Google--in the Washington Post on Sunday which noted that for the web, every source begins in 1996. The problem is that nobody wants to visit a library anymore.)

Nobody really writes about modern space policy history because there's no money in it. I think this presents problems because it requires policy makers to do more research rather than pick up a book or journal. I can guarantee you that NASA and the White House are right now making errors that were made in the last 15 years that are avoidable if only someone would point out what they are. But all organizations have problems with institutional memory.

I cannot find a copy of the original Bush speech quickly. I do, however, have a copy of the July 21 1989 New York Times article on the Bush speech and it quotes Bush as saying: "And next, for the new century, back to the Moon, back to the future, and this time back to stay. And then, a journey into tomorrow, a journey to another planet, a manned mission to Mars." No mention of the outer planets.

I do not believe that you are crazy.

I agree that it should be on line. The problem is that I've never been able to find it. And it's not so much an unwillingness to go the library as an unwillingness to go there, and scan or retype the text. It would be nice to have something that I can comment on, and link to.

Those are the excerpts I remember, though, but I think that there was something about "settle the solar system" that came in the next sentence, because I remember standing in the DEI room at Rockwell in Downey listening to the speech and being semi-amazed that he said it.

Oh, and I just reread your post about the Times piece. I didn't say "outer planets." I said "settle the solar system." That is space settlements, whether on the moon, or Mars, or in free space or asteroids.

Found it.

Bush's speech can be found here:

http://bushlibrary.tamu.edu/papers/1989/89072000.html

This is probably what you were thinking about:

"And space is the inescapable challenge to all the advanced nations of the Earth. And there's little question that, in the 21st century, humans will again leave their home planet for voyages of discovery and exploration. What was once improbable is now inevitable. The time has come to look beyond brief encounters. We must commit ourselves anew to a sustained program of manned exploration of the solar system and, yes, the permanent settlement of space."

That's it. Thanks for the link.

Not that anyone talks much about SEI in general, but I don't recall anyone ever mentioning this aspect of the speech. It was always moon and Mars, period.