An interesting interview with George Whitesides, Executive Director of the National Space Society. I would point out, though, that NASA had nothing to do with GPS.

I re-read the article to be sure I was clear on the intent of his statement: George was saying that NASA was *not* responsible for GPS. He cited GPS and comsats as examples of how the launch industry grew beyond just NASA and has been very successful.

Read the very next sentence. He is saying that "NASA served as the catalytic role and then got out of the way." It did that for comsats, but not GPS, which is a DoD program.

The sentence structure may not have been clear, but my point in the interview was simply that the government efforts in space that have had lasting value (whether DoD, NASA, NSF or other agencies) have been those that have created infrastructure usable for others. That includes a small list of examples including GPS and Comsats.

Clarification noted, George. I know that sometimes in a verbal interview, things can come out differently than intended. I just wanted to make sure that the readers understood that NASA didn't do GPS. There are enough spinoff myths out there as it is without adding a new one.

The biggest internal obstacle is NASA's achievement-oriented culture, which sees its mission as a series of discrete challenges to accomplish rather than as cultivation of general human expansion. If you asked them to make wine, they would spend millions studying its chemical composition, building extraordinarily complex and delicate equipment to synthesize poor-tasting facsimiles, and go through several generations of such machinery before something vaguely resembling wine in appearance, taste, smell, and alcohol content was produced. Then, they would put their hundred-million-dollar glass of wine in a case in the Smithsonian, dismantle all their equipment, leave the fragments to rust as a monument at Marshall, and then start entirely from scratch on their mission to make beer.

IMHO, they need more biologists, economists, MBAs, and systems people involved in top-level planning, because since it's inception NASA has been guided primarily by engineers, astronauts, and penny-wise/pound-foolish accountants.