A reasonable piece on NASA’s future by Joel Achenbach in today’s Washington Post.

The only part that I found irritating was the following:

Talone said some costs already have been reduced. But a visitor to the space center can see that there’s nothing easy and cheap about safely putting people and hardware into orbit.

Well, certainly a visitor can see that there’s nothing easy or cheap about the way that NASA chooses to put people and hardware in orbit. But one might mistakenly infer from this paragraph that there’s no other way to do it, and Achenbach does nothing to allay that impression.

If you’re a traditional space program supporter, it’s pretty gloomy reading. But it’s necessary reading, for a reality check, and to understand that things have to change. What True Believers in the von Braun vision will find most disconcerting is the end:

At the close of Friday’s hearing, Nelson asked O’Keefe an open-ended question: “What is your vision?”

O’Keefe spoke for several minutes about “prudent management principles,” reinvigorating “the entrepreneurial spirits” of NASA, the importance of collaboration with other elements of the federal government, the need to be mindful of safety and the possibility of taking advantage of this moment when NASA is at a crossroads.

He did not mention space.

That’s OK. NASA doesn’t need vision right now–it had ten years of that under Dan Goldin, and the agency is now an utter shambles. What it needs is some management, and accounting systems, and accountability. O’Keefe is exactly the right kind of guy for that. After he sorts those problems out, and starts to privatize things like Shuttle and ISS, and gets the house in order, it will make sense to start talking about vision.

And at that point, the best vision to talk about will be how to transition the agency from a socialistic Cold-War dinosaur to one that can work innovatively to enable private enterprise to open up space to business and the people, more in concert with the principles upon which this country was founded.