Except that the method of government support in the past is completely different from what the FTC is suggesting here. Your own link talks about how support was given by publishing contracts to print laws, proclamations, etc, as well as reduced mailing costs and tax exemptions. What the FTC is talking about are direct bailouts and artificial restrictions on information (copyrighting facts). Seems to me that this is the antithesis of the spirit in which the early American government promoted the free press.

Proven approaches to what? Orbital fuel depots and refueling, inflatable aero shells, tens of kW electric propulsion for manned missions, and inflatable habitats don't have proven approaches yet. That's the whole point of these kinds of programs. The only way NASA will be able to stay with "proven approaches" is to remain in LEO and build carbon-copy ISSs. Even then, I remain far from convinced that what NASA does today should be considered a "proven approach" to manned spaceflight. While they've done some amazing things, human spaceflight still remains rare and hideously expensive. I would prefer that not be the approach to such matters going into the future.

Instead of blowing money on re-inventing the wheel, except much more expensively... *cough* Ares-1

I'm disappointed in both of the linked articles. Some real substance about the design would have been nice, but as it is, I'm left with a lot of questions:
-70% less fuel? How much of that is aerodynamic savings and how much of that is engine efficiency savings?
-Did they do any wind tunnel testing of their model? How close were their CFD and tunnel test results?
-Are they using engines based closely off existing ones, or are they projecting fuel savings 25 years into the future (the 2035 time frame from the article)?
-What sort of structural weight-saving advances are they assuming, or projecting from?
-So they made the tail smaller, what makes up for the reduction in control authority there?
-Plus other more detailed questions based on the answers to those questions. Would it have been so hard for MIT to link a design document pdf or something? I guess not being a public university, they don't have to if they don't want to. Too bad.

All that is true. I never said it would be easy, just that it would be the ideal solution (aside from actually repairing the thing and putting it back in service, which is even harder). This whole incident is a good example of just how useful lower launch costs would be. Then it may just be economical to have a rendezvous craft on standby (or ready to go within a week or two) to deal with malfunctioning spacecraft.

In fact, with more reasonable launch costs, you could build a whole series of spacecraft designed to rendezvous and dispose of dead spacecraft. Basically all spacecraft have a ready-made attachment interface (the launch vehicle attach point) to latch onto. I've seen some pretty decent advances in close-in autonomous spacecraft navigation, which would be the largest technical challenge of the project. You wouldn't need to design for a long orbital life, which will ease quite a few other requirements. Solving the technical challenges would be the easy part, really. It's the business case that's hard with high launch costs and whatnot.

Sigh. It's just too bad it's not economical. It'd be a lot of fun to design and build something like that...

as I posted just above, to dispose of a spacecraft from GEO, you put it into a higher orbit above GEO where you won't be in the way of any other operational spacecraft. This is the best compromise between the amount of fuel it takes to dispose of a spacecraft and putting it somewhere where it won't cause harm. Ideally, I suppose, you would want to completely deorbit, but that would take a whole lot of fuel, eating up weight that could be used for payload. You could also send it into an earth escape orbit (put it into orbit around the sun, essentially), but that also takes a lot of fuel.

FYI, I am an aerospace engineer involved in the launch industry. Typically, how a spacecraft gets into GEO is a few stage process. First, a launch vehicle (Delta IV, Atlas V, Ariane 5, etc) puts you into orbit. What almost always happens is that the orbit the launch vehicle deposits the satellite into is a geosynchronous transfer orbit. This orbit is only useful as a, yes, transfer orbit out to actual geosynchronous orbit. From the transfer orbit, the spacecraft's own propulsion system then manuevers the craft into its designated position in GEO. But the launch vehicle itself is long gone. It takes all the delta-v the launch vehicle can deliver just to get the spacecraft into the GEO transfer orbit, so it would not be useful for doing anything else in orbit.

The best way to deal with this rogue satellite would be to send out another one to very gently attach itself to the rogue and then push it into a disposal orbit (which for GEO is typically just a higher orbit outside GEO). Blowing up the rogue would only create a huge amount of debris that would then cause problems for basically everyone in GEO, since it couldn't all be tracked or controlled.

Constellation would have done more to kill NASA than anything in Obama's new plan. Constellation was already over budget and behind schedule. If a fully developed Ares rocket had been dropped in NASA's lap, it wouldn't have been able to afford to operate it. So what do you think the next admin would do with NASA if it had been allowed to continue, accumulating delays and going further and further over budget?

The new plan is the best chance NASA has had in a long time to get back on its feet and stop languishing in LEO. Developing the higher technology needed to go beyond LEO and the moon is what NASA should be concentrating on. Let commercial companies deliver stuff to ISS and LEO.

(One a side note, it seems to me that almost everyone who hates Obama's plan forgets that there would have been just as long, if not longer, gap in US human spaceflight ability WITH constellation. We're not exactly losing a whole lot by giving commercial companies time to produce their human ferrying ability, as opposed to giving NASA time to work on Ares-1)

With NASA buying rides at a few tens of millions each vs. billion+ per launch there will be a lot more money for accomplishing things besides putting stuff into orbit on a rocket with a NASA logo on it.

So I'm all for the new plan. My biggest worry is that congress will screw up the whole thing trying to protect their pork.

While it may be cool to find life on Mars, it would present some additional problems for future colonization (or even just future missions, robotic or otherwise). If we do find life, do we quarantine Mars so that we don't contaminate the native life there? Do we bar ourselves from any terraforming efforts whatsoever so that we don't disrupt possible existing life? You all must realize that that would be the position of at least some people; what percentage of the public that might be, and the influence they would have is another question.

Generally, I think it would be much simpler if we never found life on Mars, and could in fact say with a fair amount of certainty that it is completely dead. That would remove a (possibly significant) reason to oppose human colonization and terraforming.