Today's New York Times has an article about cumulative effects of outsourcing and privatization on NASA.

As usual, all the assumptions are there: NASA is a science and technology agency, we need to have a centralized government agency for space science, we're losing our nobility of purpose, bla bla bla.

These folks remain stuck in the 1950s.

In a fairly accurate take, over at the Space Policy Digest BBS, Paul Spudis writes:

Here's a summary in 50 words or less...

NASA used to be great, but now it sucks because it uses nothing but contractors. However, JPL, alone among the centers, is God's Gift to Humanity and only screws up when it uses contractors. Eliminate human space flight and give OSS a trillion dollars a year.

There you go. The whole essence in less than 50 words. Saved you a bunch of time and effort.

OSS is Office of Space Science.

Yes, NASA has lost a lot of technical capability, and its work force is aging, but that's not so much because it uses contractors, as the fact that it's not doing much that's technically challenging, exciting or useful. It can't compete with computer graphics and the internet, or nanotech, or the technologies that people perceive as actually being relevant to their lives, as long as it stays stuck in the mode of spending billions of dollars to send a few government employees into orbit a few times a year.

And the authors of this piece have nothing to say about that problem.

That article was posted to Arocket and I considered talking about it on my own blog but I just couldn't work up the motivation to respond to the same recycled dogma. Does anyone have any idea for how we can either get rid of this idea or at least route around it?

Rand, your next-to-last paragraph is one of the most terse yet cogent summaries of the problem I've seen. Thanks.

That message needs to be conveyed, somehow... but I don't have a solution either.

Letters to the Editor?
A "Take a Science Editor To Lunch" program?
A letter to your congress critter?

I suspect it won't really change until someone besides NASA puts one through the goal posts. Maybe it'll be John Carmack or the XCOR guys.

A lot of people don't want to hear how badly the aerospace bureaucracy is handling things. If the "crown jewel" of the Federal government is driving relatively ordinary (as compared to space fanatics) people from the field, what does that say about the "crown jewel" and, by inference, other bureaucracies of similar nature?

And if the large, rigid, long lasting hierarchical bureaucratic model has such severe problems, what will it mean for the few beneficiaries at the top?

Yes, I'm still working on a paper that explores this topic.

I'm glad this thinking did not occur in Europe 300 years ago. Only people with the "right stuff", and I hate that term and the implication it carries for the rest of us, these people sanctioned by the governments of Europe would have been allowed to come here for scientific purposes. All ships would have been built to government specs, i.e. too big, too expensive, too small, too whatever for the mission.

No permanent bases would have been built, one 5 man tent would have been pitched on the beach and a rotating group of college graduates would have been ALLOWED to spend time in the tent.

And the bad part, somehow the bureaucrats would have been able to convince almost everyone that the status quo was the only way to achieve the goal.

Does anyone remember what the original goal was?