A few months ago, I interviewed Gary Hudson, long-time space entrepreneur.

Clark Lindsey has done so as well, and it’s a very interesting one. While some of the discussion of Alternate Access may sound like “inside baseball” (as it were), this is a very important story, and sadly not atypical of NASA behavior, and one of the many reasons we make so little progress.

Clark makes a good point here:

There doesn’t seem to be much of a tradition of investigative journalism within the aerospace press. When you talk about your case and the X-37 situation, it reminds me of the X-34 cancellation, which I saw as an outrage if not a scandal. As I understand it, in the aftermath of the two Mars mission failures, all major projects got hit with system reviews to avoid any more embarassing public disasters. For the X-34, they added so many additional safety requirements that it crossed their cost limit and so was canceled. This happened even though, in traditional X project spirit, Orbital had built 3 vehicles just so it would have backups if one was lost. In addition, NASA had required that they use the Fastrac engine, which as far as I know, was a project that simply faded away without ever flying an engine or making any public accounting whatsoever.

You surely know more about what really happened in these cases than I do. However, the fact that I have to guess as to what happened [in these and your cases] rather than go to a NASA web page and read a clear and full summary of such projects [and how decisions regarding them were made] absolutely amazes me. And I’m even more amazed that the aerospace press lets them get away with it.

Yes. Unfortunately, being a good investigative reporter in this field requires both good journalistic skills, and knowledge of both the technical and programmatic aspects of the industry. That’s a combination that’s in scant supply, and there aren’t very many publications in whose interest it is, necessarily, to turn over the rocks. Even when the stories are told, it’s mostly in the trade press–it rarely makes it into the mainstream where the public becomes aware of it because, well, space just Isn’t Important.

And when the only scandal is perceived to be a waste of money (as opposed to the real tragedy, which is the time lost, and opportunity cost, and continued delay in making serious progress), that doesn’t stand out that much in the context of the general waste of government funds. People have become inured to the notion that Big Aerospace wastes money, and that almost fails to be news any more.