RAND SIMBERG ON SPACE in NRO:

NASA is going to have to decide if its plans are really “affordable” and “sustainable,” as the president demanded.

In the meantime, investors continue to pour money into the new private spaceflight industry, with hundreds of advance orders for personal rocket rides. NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program is moving ahead to encourage more commercial entities to provide space transportation, and the agency is moving more aggressively in offering prizes and other innovative procurement techniques.

Perhaps, forty-five years after a race initiated by a socialist-state space program, and 25 years after a failed attempt at our own socialist program, it’s time for NASA to support even more vigorously the new space era. The space program should be based on the American values of free enterprise and individualism, not on NASA’s failed 5, 10, and 25 year plans.

Indeed.