Audacious Visions For Future Spaceflight

NASA is not at the moment a space organisation.
They are a welfare organisation for aerospace.

For example - taking the budget for the Space Launch System up till the first couple of flights, and purchasing commercial launch from SpaceX gets you 85000 tons or so launched. (Assuming that reusability does not kick in)

Everything done in space by NASA is driven by launch costs.

The size of spacecraft has to be reduced, and they have to be more carefully engineered and built, which dramatically raises costs.

NASAs previous attempt to lower launch costs (X33) picked a major aerospace companies bid.
This company proposed, with NASAs encouragement to use three seperate fundamentally untried technologies on the one vehicle.
(Linear aerospike, conformal tanks, and metallic TPS).

SpaceX (for example) is building on their successful rocket launches so far, with the aim of reusing their rockets several-many times.
At the moment, space launch costs several thousand dollars a kilo.
The soon-to-be-launched http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)#Grasshopper [wikipedia.org] is a test stage, to test propulsive landing for the first stage - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE [youtube.com] is a video outlining this.

The absolute starting point for any space program has to be getting things into space.
Doing this expensively, for political reasons (SLS,...) means you have a welfare reason, not a space reason.

A sane space agency should have very limited mission definitions.
'Fly safely to ISS, dock using this adaptor'.
Previously they've made a practice of making proposals that effectively pick from one of several large aerospace corporations.
By requiring technologies they've developed, for no good reason, rather than simple functional requirements.

A fundamental change in space could occur if SpaceX (or one of the other new entrants) gets reusability up and running.
The fuel cost for a launch is well under $10/kg.
Even if you 'only' get to $100/kg, from the current $5000/kg or so, that enables a dramatically different space program.
It becomes feasible to put a lot more people up, and have them debug stuff on orbit.
It becomes comparatively cheap to have massive redundancy in systems, based on comparatively inexpensive and massive designs.

You don't end up spending 220 million to design an air-conditioner.
You launch 5 candidate systems built by bidders for $10M, and see which one works.

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