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RAND SIMBERG: Repeating Myths Of A Flawed NASA Past: In the new plan, NASA will no longer be spe?

By Glenn Reynolds

RAND SIMBERG: Repeating Myths Of A Flawed NASA Past:

In the new plan, NASA will no longer be spending all its scarce resources (and in the coming fiscal austerity, it?s a safe bet that those resources will be getting even more scarce) on developing an unnecessary new rocket and capsule for its own use to get to orbit. Instead, it will be purchasing that service at much lower cost, allowing it to focus its resources on actually sending people beyond earth orbit, and to do things that it hasn?t done before. \The new policy will actually allow NASA, finally, to live up to the model of free enterprise and competition that Mr. Adams mistakenly thought was in place for the past half century.

In fact, I predict that the next expedition to replicate the circumlunar voyage of Apollo 8 will be a private one, and that it will happen within a decade. Meanwhile, rather than repeating what it did forty-plus years ago with the low-risk (but high-cost) technologies represented by Constellation (aka ?Apollo on Steroids,? but actually Apollo on Geritol), NASA will finally be going far beyond Apollo and getting on with true human deep-space exploration, while helping the rest of us get on with the actual development and settlement of space.

Read the whole thing.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on August 28, 2010 (boomark / email).