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What NASA needs is a grandiose plan and a budget to match. Authorizing a couple of shuttle launches a year is not going to cut it. The infrastructure is getting old and the industry is rotting with it. When was the last time anyone used the word rocket scientist other than in a joke?

The program needs a mass infusion of fresh talent, and that we will need to encourage tens of thousands of talented young people to dedicate themselves to the challanges of a new and exiting career. It needs to become a booming business again as it was in the 1960s and early 70s. A focal point for our most creative to work and develop new and previously untested technologies.

If the shuttle program has taught us anything, it is that the conquest of space can never be done on the cheap. But, with new momentum, we can also expect tremendous rewards. Once again we may be able to put our people and our industries on a firm technological footing. We may provide the competitive advantage so needed by our own industrial base.

Frankly, I am amaze by the call for privatization. NASA has always been a program built upon private enterprise. It is a purchasing agent, and a coordinating body for the government, which relies on the talents and creativity of private enterprise for its implementation. What more privatization could we possibly want? Care must also be taken less our tax dollars be used to fund another nation's competitive advantage. Sometimes it is worthwhile to have the ability to classify and regulate the dissemination of technology. At least to hold on to the technology long for long enough to allow our companies enough time to commercialize it. Perhaps by privatization we mean that the outside of our next spaceship should be smeared with a plenora of advertisements to look like an overgrown race car?

Then there is the very real issue of national security. Our private high-tech industries have been hard hit by the recession, and we have precious few US manufactured technologies on the store shelves. We have to wonder where the next generation of smart weapons is going to come from. It is certainly not going to come from our youth if they are limited to working at fast food joints, retail stores, and daytrading.

The original space program was our largest recruiting poster for an entire generation of engineers, operations managers, and other creative people. What we have today is just a vestigal remnant of that program. We can choose to put the excitement and energy back into the program , or we can choose to teach our kids Chinese. But, it is time to decide what our national space program was, is, and should be.

I agree that mankind needs to expand. And I agree that colonizing the solar system is our destiny.

But I do not agree that the success of military hardware, such as BMD systems, depends on the current success of today's manned space program.

And I do not agree that the current efforts in manned space exploration (such as the ISS and the shuttles) is the most productive and efficient way to build the infrastructure needed to colonize the solar system.

The ISS is all glitz and very little substance. It has nothing to do with military superiority and is a grossly inefficient contribution to solar system colonization.