This is off-topic for Skylab’s demise, but I was just thinking about Skylab’s beginnings. The rapidity of Skylab’s development and deployment is amazing to me, given the pace I’ve become accustomed to.
Yeah, things ain’t like they used to be.
Yeah. That’s the difference between a fairly new organization that thought of itself as the cutting edge of humanity and had already, in its short history, done great things, and a moribund, aging, hidebound and bureaucratic agency that has done little else of note in two generations. Given that NASA is a government organization, this transition was always probably inevitable. Government agencies, being, for the most part, immortal, of necessity spend the vast majority of their existences in stagnation mode after the early excitement and confidence mode staffers leave or retire.
Of course a lot of government agencies never even have an early productive phase, they just go immediately into moribund, hidebound bureaucracy mode from the day of launch. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau comes to mind as an exemplar.
Probably too much to expect from someone of your political persuasion, but the contrast between NASA in its glory days and NASA in its dysfunctional and wasteful present circumstances is one of the reasons we conservative types aren’t much enamored of establishing big government programs as the default solution to every perceived problem.
This is off-topic for Skylab’s demise, but I was just thinking about Skylab’s beginnings. The rapidity of Skylab’s development and deployment is amazing to me, given the pace I’ve become accustomed to.
Yeah, things ain’t like they used to be.
Yeah. That’s the difference between a fairly new organization that thought of itself as the cutting edge of humanity and had already, in its short history, done great things, and a moribund, aging, hidebound and bureaucratic agency that has done little else of note in two generations. Given that NASA is a government organization, this transition was always probably inevitable. Government agencies, being, for the most part, immortal, of necessity spend the vast majority of their existences in stagnation mode after the early excitement and confidence mode staffers leave or retire.
Of course a lot of government agencies never even have an early productive phase, they just go immediately into moribund, hidebound bureaucracy mode from the day of launch. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau comes to mind as an exemplar.
Probably too much to expect from someone of your political persuasion, but the contrast between NASA in its glory days and NASA in its dysfunctional and wasteful present circumstances is one of the reasons we conservative types aren’t much enamored of establishing big government programs as the default solution to every perceived problem.