Rand Simberg is a great guy, but he is wrong about the results of canceling Constellation. That NASA is a messy, often wrongheaded, politicized, bloated government bureaucracy is not the issue. Of course it is; it’s a government agency.

The issue is, should America go back to the Moon? The Obama administration’s handpicked Commission claimed that under their 2010 budget plan, NASA would not be able to get back to the Moon’s surface until the 2030s without a large budget increase. That finding was disputed by former NASA administrator Mike Griffin. In fact, no one really knows. Projecting program costs over a couple of years is hard enough; doing it over a couple of decades is nonsense.

Large space programs are difficult to build and hard to manage. Mike Griffin was determined to avoid the mistakes made in the 1970s when the Shuttle was starved of development funds and survived on a shoestring. He poured money into the Ares 1 rocket and the Orion capsule because he was determined to make them the safest and most reliable vehicles possible. The administration claims that this involved “old” technology, yet it will now rely on even older Russian Soyuz systems for human access to space.

To imagine that this will create a new commercial space industry is a stretch. After almost a decade of work, SpaceX has managed to get one customer’s satellite into orbit. Their Falcon 9 vehicle is at least six months late. We’ll see if they can meet their obligations under the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) contract

they signed. These firms may have the potential to be useful service providers, but they cannot get us to the Moon.

The worst thing about scrapping Constellation is that it will destroy or disable large parts of the U.S. space industry, in particular our large-solid-rocket–manufacturing capability. Someday we are going to have to replace our long-range missiles, and if the expertise is gone it will take years and billions of dollars to replace it.

The Augustine Commission said they were “Seeking a Human Spaceflight Program worthy of a Great Nation.” Twiddling our thumbs in low Earth orbit for another decade or more is a sign that we have given up on ourselves.

It would be wonderful if space exploration could be done by private enterprise, but that is simply not going to happen. Certainly not until launch costs are reduced to a tiny fraction of what they are today. Until then we are stuck with NASA, with all the imperfections that implies. If Constellation dies it will be a sign that America is in a deep national funk, and yet another show of weakness for all the world to see.

– Taylor Dinerman writes a weekly column for TheSpaceReview.com.