So: they don't have an e-mail address for you, or a phone number, and you throw out all postal mail you get from them. How do you suggest they contact you if there's a problem? I wouldn't be in favor of overuse of this method, but if you've got a 'bot running on your system, you're part of a problem and maybe something a little heavy-handed is warranted.

I think this is a good method. It's a lot harder to ignore than other ways that you've suggested (how much of an automated phone message would you listen to if it started as "This is a courtesy call from Comcast internet services ..."). HTTP also a service that people are more likely to use every day, and there's little chance that an errant spam filter will block it.

A risk - in theory - is that when people see this popup, they'll say "I'm supposed to not interact with these things" and just click "Close," rather than understanding what it says. On the other hand, if your computer is infected with some sort of 'bot, you probably click through things like this anyway.

Which is a great thing. LEO is something that private companies can do (or are very near being able to do), so there's no reason to compete against them. So I'm good with the part about shifting that part of the responsibility away from NASA.

At the same time, I don't see where the exploration role fits in to this new plan. That's the part that concerns me.

Having said that, so far all of the things that we've heard have been leaks and conjecture. So it's probably not fair to condemn (or applaud) the plan until we've heard what it actually is.

In the earliest days of private air travel, one of the biggest and most reliable customers was the government - the US Postal Service. The government can create an initial market that allows private companies to be created and innovate to become cheaper and more reliable; that innovation creates makes the platform reliable and affordable, which encourages private market demand.

That's not to say that I support this decision. As stated by some other posters here, private (or publicly traded) companies aren't interested in the sort of exploration for exploration's sake that the government can do - they only "explore" if there is a known profit to be made. The problem with space exploration is that despite any evidence of great things sent back by robotic probes, there aren't really any clear avenues for profit in deep space missions. That doesn't mean that the opportunities aren't there, it just means that we don't know about them - the government can help us find them, and along the way the government can share what it learned with the nascent commercial spaceflight industry - to the benefit of all.

Or we can scrap it and hope for the best. America has already lost in the commercial satellite launch business; now we're on track to lose the rest - then what? We are one of two nations on this planet that have both the means and experience to create a great human spaceflight program. Are we going to throw that away?