I’ve often noted that, had the Bush administration been truly serious about the VSE, they would have at least attempted to create a new agency to carry it out, because NASA simply carries too much bureaucratic and pork-laden baggage from its Cold-War origins. This would be similar to what happened in the eighties, when the Reagan/Bush administration realized that they couldn’t count on the Air Force to do missile defense properly, and set up SDIO to report directly to the SecDEF.
Anyway, Frank Sietzen asks the question today, if you were building a new space agency from scratch, what would it look like?
There’d be two parts: SARPA and a guy with a budget and phone for buying stuff from the private sector. One of SARPA’s teams of brainiacs would be a team of economists who advised the “phone & budget” guy on how to structure his purchases to best seed markets that actually produce the goals set out by VSE.
Rand, it never woulda happened. SDIO survived because it was obvious even to Joe Sixpack that there was a new mission.
If Bush & Co. had tried to set up a new agency to “do what NASA already does” they would have been pilloried in the media for “senseless waste” and “needless duplication of effort” — not to mention “steering multibillion-dollar contracts to cronies of the Administration.” (Give me a few minutes and I could even attach likely by-lines to those synthetic quotes.)