How the return to the moon is different this time

As the flight of the Artemis II draws nigh, the law professor and venerable Instapundit blogger offers a warning in the pages of the New York Post. Glenn Reynolds suggests that because of the flawed Space Launch System and the Orion space capsule’s heat shield problems, NASA is “flirting with disaster.”

The cause of the Space Launch System fiasco has been covered before, a product of the damage wrought upon NASA space exploration at the hands of then-President Barack Obama. But could things have transpired differently? It would have depended on political players making better decisions than they did in real life.

Unless we are to suppose a counterfactual in which President George W. Bush’s Constellation program was well and efficiently run, we have to go back to 2010, when Obama was presented with the results of the Second Augustine Commission report. The report concluded that the Constellation program was so badly off the rails that it was not executable. It suggested two possible scenarios for a revamped deep space program: On the one hand “Moon first,” and on the other, something called “Flexible Path,” which would bypass the moon. Both plans would eventually send astronauts to Mars.

In our timeline, Obama unceremoniously cancelled Constellation in his budget proposal in 2010, setting off a political firestorm that resulted in Congress mandating the Space Launch System. But what if Obama had taken a different tack?

Let us suppose that Obama had invited congressional leaders for a White House meeting to discuss........

© The Hill