As with his excellent dissection of what was wrong with STS, which I really loved, Maciej Ceglowski has written an excellent essay on the Vision for Space Exploration, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, and the real impetus behind a Moon and Mars Shot. As before, one minor niggle:

O’Keefe, you may recall, was the political genius who cancelled the Shuttle mission to upgrade the Hubble telescope, the most beloved piece of scientific apparatus in the world, on the grounds that it was too dangerous to fly anywhere but to the Space Station. Since the Hubble is one of the most useful tools ever to come out of NASA, and the Hubble upgrade is the only Shuttle mission that genuinely requires a manned crew, the decision didn’t go over well with anyone. But rather than back down, O’Keefe had the audacity to ask for over a billion dollars in funding to develop an alternate plan. We will save the Hubble, he said, with robots. But we must hurry.

I’d agree with the bolded bit only if you argue that ISS isn’t a necessary function. You can’t do ISS robotically—we just don’t have the capability to do the complex EVA activities that ISS requires with robots. Even the stowage of stuff in the MPLMs really can’t be done by robots given the dexterity issues.

But other than that, Maciej is very much on the mark. The re-use of Shuttle components is probably more important than he’d think—we’ll get some significant cost efficiencies from not having all the non-recurring design engineering costs—but given that they’ll be integrated differently, there’ll still be all sorts of fun involved.

And yes, … this promises to be a lot of fun. I think I’ll have to ask corporate what I can discuss.