Category Archives: Business

Business, Economics, Political Commentary

NASA Flails

13 Comments

A good description of the current mess, from Bobby Block and Mark Matthews:

With the space shuttle set to retire this year, and no successor imminent, today’s NASA is being pulled apart by burdensome congressional demands, shrinking federal budgets, greedy contractors, a hidebound bureaucracy and an ambitious new commercial space industry that wants to shake up the status quo.

“Our civil space agency has decayed from Kennedy’s and Reagan’s visions of opening a new frontier to the point where it’s just a jobs program in a death spiral of addiction and denial, with thousands of honest innovators trapped inside like flies in bureaucratic amber,” said space-policy consultant James Muncy.

It occurred to me yesterday that NASA is a lot like Cuba, with its perfectly preserved 1950s vintage cars. It’s frozen in time in the sixties and seventies.

[Update a while later]

An excellent analogy at The Space Review today: NASA must take a small-ball approach.

[Update a few minutes later]

Can NASA develop a heavy-lift rocket? On the evidence, the answer would seem to be “no.” Of course, the real question is whether or not we need one, but Congress does, to keep the jobs going.

Business, Political Commentary, Space

The Problem With Central Planning

1 Comment

…which is to say, the problem with HEFT.

There is a civil war going on within the space agency, and even at headquarters itself. On one side is the old guard, who still cannot envision a NASA that doesn’t develop, own and operate its own launch systems. On the other are those who see that it must abandon this old failed paradigm in order to both afford to, and have the robust ETO infrastructure necessary to, move aggressively and sustainably beyond low earth orbit. The people running space policy on the Hill are (so far), sustaining the old guard, but they’re going to have a collision with reality in the next year, and they’re going to have more trouble than in the past getting their colleagues to go along with them, as hard choices have to be made about the budget, and progress in the new mode of contracting becomes increasingly undeniable. It cannot continue.

[Update a few minutes later]

I should note that Clark’s well-justified rant is based on this post by Jon Goff, in which he vents his frustration at the wilful blindness of the HEFT team to both technical and fiscal reality.