Your comment about the “down-mass” of the Soyuz was interesting, I hadn’t heard that before. Like I said, I hope NASA can prove in the next ten years that it can make something of the ISS. In the final analysis it all beats spending the money on inventing ever more efficient ways to kill other humans.

The biggest problem I have with kids getting inspiration from iPhones is that I have to wonder what those devices are inspiring kids to *do*. Become the guy who wrote the most popular “pull my finger” app? Get a lot of “like” votes on Facebook? Make a couple thousand bucks? We must ask ourselves how much any of that matters. On the other hand, what does space exploration – crewed or robotic – inspire the next generation to do? Investigate the universe! Answer fundamental scientific questions! Solve challenging engineering problems! The kinds of things that dramatically improve life on Earth as well as in space.

What you’ve said about the Space Station may have been true before it came up to its full crew complement, but is not true currently. With only three people on board, there was little time between Station maintenance tasks to accomplish a lot of science, though they did get plenty done. Now there are enough crew members that there are some dedicated to science! The biggest issue for the continued scientific utilization of ISS is the orbital access gap after the Shuttle retires. The Shuttle brings a lot of experiments and equipment UP to the station, and brings a lot of experiments and results DOWN. Soyuz does not have the “down-mass” capacity to bring completed experiments back to Earth, nor would Orion. What we need to fully utilize ISS, in my opinion, is a vehicle like the X-38 – something that would probably best be developed in-house at NASA, since there’s not yet a lot of incentive for private companies to make a profit doing something similar.

Back in the 60s NASA was clearly the technical juggernaut inspiring kids to become scientists and engineers. These days I think it is exactly the iPhones, iPods and droids that you mentioned that are inspiring youngsters (all of which were American innovations). If space has anything to do with that it’s the robotic missions to Mars that are capturing all the attention as opposed to human spaceflight. It seems to me that the spacestation crew spend just about all their time on either personal or spacestation maintenance as opposed to doing any useful science with that hardware.

As an outsider I think Obama’s space strategy is exactly on the right track. NASA is not owed an exciting mission, if it can make the ISS amount to something over the next 10 years maybe it can earn one.

I agree that a space program without direction would be terrible. But I think what bothers me more than more than more than more is that the Shuttle *has* to retire now. So what are we going to do with ISS? I guess we’ll be turning it over to Russian operations – at least until ESA gets a man-rated version of Jules Verne up and running. Then we’ll be behind all of Eurasia, hoping for Falcon 9 to come along…

What bothers me even more than more is that Obama seems to want to cut this program on his own prerogative, regardless of the expert opinions of, say, the Augustine Commission, which was very supportive of manned spaceflight. Which means he could just as easily strike at anything in the space program that doesn’t tickle his fancy.

And what bothers me more than more than more, is that we are now going to return to the listless and purposeless space program of the 1980s and 1990s. Back then we had Space Shuttles, but no idea what the point was. An ISS without a real purpose. Then Bush comes along and (for better or worse) gives NASA some direction (albeit perhaps not enough funding for it). Now we’re going to back to a purposeless space program (unless you count building umpteen carbon-dioxide-detecting satellites a purpose).