I'd rather have a factory on the moon, than land there make a few footsteps and take off again.

We've already stopped our manned space program a number of times after accidents. It is a difficult and costly endeavour and I for one am not fooled by the "threat" of the chinese space program. I'm threatened as much by the Russian plans for a manned mission to mars they were going to do decades ago. The cold war is over and the moon race is over. The next issue is to really use the moon and that means concentrated on automated exploration.

I've laid out one short term purpose for men in space (low gravity experiments) and the manned program could continue some manned presence just to do those experiments. Although it is probably throwing good money after bad, after spending several 100 Billion, I would like to see the ISS finally used for some research.

Development of a heavy lift cargo capability is needed for both manned and unmanned programs. My priority would be to fast track unmanned capability and defer man rating and escape mechanisms to a later date. We're doing things in the wrong order and it is delaying accomplishments on both the unmanned and manned sides of the space program.

The NSF controls a lot of money for our countries general research. They use committees to prioritize the use of money. NASA is no different in the use of committees. From what I can see on the manned side the ethos of doing things purely to keep putting men in space has never stopped from the original moon race. A lot of ex astronauts feeling nostalgia and on the boards of aerospace companies keep things like the ISS alive when it should have died.

On the manned side, I want to see plans for SUSTAINED presence. And I want to see a logical progression of finding out what is needed for a sustained presence. Until they deliver that kind of plan, I expect we'll see more of the flags and footprints approach that makes money for aerospace companies, but is wasteful and inefficient.