As I wrote the other day, what a mess:

Even Nelson, who described Obama’s speech at KSC as “visionary,” has advocated continued Ares rocket testing because it could mean a few hundred jobs at the center, which is set to lose as many as 9,000 workers once the shuttle completes its final three missions.

Much of the gridlock over Obama’s plan can be traced back to one sentence inserted by Shelby into a spending bill last year that bars NASA from canceling Constellation programs this year without congressional approval. Not only has that sentence prevented NASA from quickly switching to Obama’s new plan, but it also has given Congress time to kill his proposal and save Constellation.

Indeed, the tactic has proven so effective that lawmakers loyal to Constellation are considering a similar move in upcoming spending bills. That possibility has bureaucrats on both sides of the issue combing through thick pages of appropriations measures to ensure that the other doesn’t gain ground.

With such scrutiny, the issue may not be decided until Congress ultimately approves its 2011 budget — which may not happen until the winter holiday season.

OK, someone explain to me why, if the government is operating on a continuing resolution into the winter, and the Republicans have taken over one or both houses, and will be in power in January, why they wouldn’t simply filibuster any “Mad Duck” attempt to ram through an appropriations bill in December, and then do a new one in February?

…from Senator Hutchison and Congresswoman Kosmas:

One alternative we have proposed would be to slow the flight rate of the remaining space shuttle missions and move those flights into next year and possibly 2012 while manifesting the planned backup flight with an available cargo capability. We can use this time to complete a detailed assessment of the spare and replacement equipment needs and provide for carriage to the space station if our analysis shows limits in other cargo vehicles. This modest measure would not call for increases to the number of shuttle flights, but instead would simply space them so the gap for America to deliver people and critical cargo to the space station under our own power would be narrowed considerably.

There is a tempo to processing the vehicles. If it is exceeded (trying to fly too fast) safety will be compromised. What these people apparently don’t understand is that you can also process too slowly, to the point at which the personnel will lose their edge. On top of that, each flight would end up costing two or three billion dollars. Each.

…from Gene Kranz:

In an interview on the balcony of the U.S Space & Rocket Center near a life-sized model of the Saturn V rockets he launched four times, Kranz said he’s worried about losing unique NASA expertise.

“I believe that our nation cannot afford this kind of an impact,” the 76-year-old Kranz said. “We have the most talented team of people – scientists, engineers, mathematicians, technicians.

“I was there when we started and had to build this kind of a team,” Kranz said. “It took three to five years to get the people in place and get them trained, and we had a very healthy aircraft industry at that time that we could get people from.

“Once you send this team away,” Kranz said, “I think they have totally underestimated the difficulty they’re going to have getting a team capable of designing, building and testing a spacecraft.”

“This team” hasn’t successfully designed, built or tested a spacecraft since the seventies. All it’s done is operate one, at humungous costs. In particular Marshall’s history over the past three decades is a litany of failure. As Mike Griffin said, part of the purpose of Ares was to actually create such a team at Marshall, via on-the-job training. So if you’re worried about a “team” being broken up, that horse was out of the barn long ago.

The Huntsville-designed Saturn V “was a darn well-designed spacecraft,” Kranz said. “I wish we had it today.”

I’ll bet you do. Unfortunately, it too was horrifically expensive. The only reason that we built as many as we did was that it was important to beat the Soviets to the moon. It had little to do with space, per se. And Marshall has done little since to justify its existence, because NASA has become unimportant (space was never important, even during Apollo), and instead merely a jobs program. But ironically, as the Space Frontier Foundation points out to the hypocritical Senator Shelby, it has apparently become too big to fail.

[Update a while later]

An emailer who wishes to remain anonymous writes:

The team Gene remembers was destroyed in 1969-1970, in the first space draw-down. (As I recall ABC made a movie about it called “An American Tragedy.”) The competent technical people left the agency and the incompetent bureaucrats remained behind because it was the only job they could do. Add to that the destruction of US’s industrial base by the EPA and safety-firsters, and the Communist take-over of the educational system, and that explains the rotten mess visible today. I’m surprised we manage to launch anything at all.

Back in the mid eighties, someone at JSC told me that the reason that the space station was such a mess was that it had become a make-work project for deadwood from the Shuttle development program as it wound down. I won’t mention the name, but it was someone high in the organization at that time, and now retired.

I’ve been predicting for weeks that there will be a continuing resolution on the budget, which means that NASA won’t know what their budget for new initiatives is for many months (and long after the start of the fiscal year at the beginning of October. Now AvLeak is reporting that this is looking quite likely, which means the policy chaos will continue into next year, at which point it’s also quite likely that the Republicans (so far no fans of the new plan in the Congress, other than Rohrabacher) will write the new budget at least in the House. What a mess.