Then I trust it will be alright with you if the skeptics ignore you. Since people with your lack of skepticism have also believed (among many other things) in:

(1) Perpetual Motion.
(2) The car from the 1950’s that ran on water (which the oil companies of course covered up).
(3) The Roswell UFO crash.
(4) Etc.

Trying to discredit other peoples opinions by use of “historical analogy” can be played by anyone.

Fusion reactors and space elevators are also scoffed at. But not by the same people who scoffed at steamboats.

“For now, NASA is still vital to providing the funding for such exploration efforts.”

The NewSpace crowd may be completely oblivious to their own hubris but others are not.

“Find just one that specifies reusable Lunar and Mars vehicles and I could be proved wrong-”

You have to be proven right before actually being proven wrong. That so many assume the flexible path was ever “right” in the first place is a red flag all by itself.

The U.S. space program has drifted far off the path it started on looking for some cheap workaround to expanding the human presence into the solar system. There is no cheap. An indication of this is the call for fictional “reusable huge rockets” to land on Mars built by a “entrepreneur” while damning the factual most powerful launch vehicle ever created that is only just capable of returning to the Moon.

I will ignore the scoffers who think private companies will never built huge rockets, since they also scoffed at steamboats, airplanes, and even going to the Moon. Private companies generally cannot support pure exploration efforts, as there is no profit in it. For now, NASA is still vital to providing the funding for such exploration efforts.

I admit that I would like to still be alive when mankind lands on Mars, but not at the expense of an Apollo Mission Model based, flags and footprints type mission plan, since it cannot and will not last.
(All of the current NASA Mars plans fall into this category! ). Find just one that specifies reusable Lunar and Mars vehicles and I could be proved wrong.

I strongly support and endorse international Lunar and Mars mission planning and shared funding.

John Strickland

The promised cheap astronaut taxi has yet to fly a person but is certainly sending satellites up for profit (largely on the taxpayers dime).

While landing back lower stages is a nifty parlor trick and makes for a great infomercial, the numbers concerning these concepts have not changed since they were first studied a half a century ago. Every feature used to enable “reusability” cuts into the payload to such an extant it makes no economical sense at all compared to dropping spent stages in the ocean.

In other words, it’s a scam.

So more than 86% of the mass needed for an interplanetary journey could still be provided from the Moon’s low gravity well!

Marcel

Rather, I meant those that think that by commercial entities alone can we do what we set out to do.

I imagine you’ve seen the type; those that see commercial entities as beating NASA to Mars, doing things better than NASA, etc.

As you point out, using both is the logical answer.

I voted for him in the slim hope he would end our military adventures overseas and bring the troops home. I now have another forlorn hope to pray about: th prospect of climate change being addressed with space solar power (Gerard K. O’Neill was proposing this 40 years ago).

This issue is vaguely similar to the F-22 being canceled; Both McCain and Obama promised to cancel this quarter billion dollar each fighter plane as too expensive. It did not matter who won- it was a dead duck.

If both candidates were to campaign on Moon return and space solar power (one as a cure for climate change and the other as the path to global energy dominance) then it would not matter who won- we would be going back to the Moon either way.

There is no clear objective.
Boots on Mars does not serve the public in any way. Continuing to go around in circles pouring 4 billion a year into some cans in LEO is accomplishing nothing. Thus when a Human Space Flight budget of billions goes up for approval there is not much to recommend it to the public- and it shows.

The public is generally disinterested in space for good reasons.

In my view the GEO satellite infrastructure is the first target of opportunity for NASA human spaceflight. Why isn’t the space station to nowhere hovering over North America providing a human-crewed laboratory for improved telecommunications? Radiation.

The thousands of tons of water to protect GEO telecommunications space stations can come from only one place- the lunar poles.

The second target of opportunity for NASA human spaceflight is the nuclear deterrent. We presently have an arsenal of missiles in land-based silos and submarines that is vulnerable and on hair trigger alert- and in need of about a trillion dollars of funds over the next ten years. Moving those warheads into deep space on human crewed “space boomers” would divert that trillion dollars into a cislunar infrastructure. Russia and China would follow our example.

And the last target of opportunity for NASA human spaceflight has already been mentioned: Gerard Kitchen O’Neill’s plan to beam down the energy to power civilization on Earth from space (using lunar resources). Let the next administration prove their commitment to solving climate change, or depending on which party triumphs, providing energy independence.

This kind of goal setting would be the equivalent of Apollo-with-a-purpose in the 21st century. And the public would be very interested.

Sadly because there does not appear to be any sign of that sort of leadership developing.

Still it never hurts to try.

On a happier note, if you are the Marsha Freeman who wrote the book The Extraterrestrial Imperative; I greatly enjoyed it.