Jeff Krukin says no.

I agree. We have too many departments already. But we do need a lot better interagency coordination of space policy, something that having a space council might or might not help with. I in fact agree with his recommendations in general (though in addition to elevating the Office of Space Commerce, I would re-elevate AST back out of the FAA and have it report directly to the SECDOT, as it did when originally formed in the eighties).

Well, another satellite gets tossed into the drink instead of into orbit:

Brunschwyler said the first sign of trouble during today’s failed launch occurred about three minutes after liftoff, when the Taurus XL rocket’s telemetry showed no sign it had shed its clamshell-like payload fairing.

The fairing is a nose-mounted shroud that protects the spacecraft inside from the Earth’s atmosphere until the booster reaches space. Once it separates, launch controllers expected to see OCO and its upper stage accelerate faster since it would have shed the excess weight. But that speed boost never occurred.

“As a direct result of carrying that extra weight, we could not make orbit,” Brunschwyler said, adding that the failure ultimately sent OCO crashing into the ocean near Antarctica. “We’re fairly certain that it did not fly over any land and it landed short of Antarctica.”

Failure to separate cleanly, or at all, is one of the most common causes of a launch failure of an expendable vehicle. And because it’s expendable, like every other aspect of a launch, each fairing separation is a first one. There’s no way to test it to ensure that it will separate properly when it is supposed to.

Had this been a reusable space transport, it would have had a payload bay door that had been operated successfully many times in the past (and the vehicle would have had the performance capability to take it all the way to orbit). And if for some reason it couldn’t be opened on orbit, the mission would have been aborted, and the payload returned safely to earth to await another attempt, and a three-hundred-million-dollar satellite would have been preserved.

But instead, we continue to put up satellites on unreliable throwaway rockets that generally have much less value than the cargo, but often destroy it. And we plan to continue to do so on steroids, with the abominable plans for Constellation.

The proverbial Martian, looking at how we do spaceflight, would scratch his head at the antics of these crazy earthlings, but wouldn’t be at all surprised that we’d made so little progress in conquering his homeworld. And all because we were in such a hurry half a century ago that we decided to put up satellites with munitions.

[Update a few minutes later]

That satellite cost almost three hundred thousand dollars a pound.

There’s got to be a better way.

Congress has finally gotten around to passing an FY09 budget for agencies operating on a continuing resolution, including NASA. Jeff Foust has the numbers. I’m not sure the last time this happened, if ever, but it actually is getting more than it requested. There is no change in manned spaceflight (Shuttle plus ISS plus Exploration) but aeronautics and science are getting a bump. As Jeff notes, this doesn’t include the extra billion that the agency gets in “stimulus.”

So, for the first time in a long time, the agency is flush, and not getting its budget cut. I guess that when the old saying has gone from “a billion here and a billion there,” to “a trillion here and a trillion there,” it gets hard to argue for fiscal discipline in any area, even one that has traditionally been contentious. It’s just a shame that so much of the money is wasted, given NASA’s current plans.

Doug Messier notes that it’s been a quarter of a century since Ronald Reagan called on NASA to put up a space station within a decade.