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.
