First, over at the Gray Lady, he has an editorial on NASA’s cost-overrun culture:

…the Mars Science Laboratory is only the latest symptom of a NASA culture that has lost control of spending. The cost of the James Webb Space Telescope, successor to the storied Hubble, has increased from initial estimates near $1 billion to almost $5 billion. NASA’s next two weather satellites, built for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, have now inflated to over $3.5 billion each! The list goes on: N.P.P., S.D.O., LISA Pathfinder, Constellation and more. You don’t have to know what the abbreviations and acronyms mean to get it: Our space program is running inefficiently, and without sufficient regard to cost performance. In NASA’s science directorate alone, an internal accounting in 2007 found over $5 billion in increases since 2003.

As Allen Thompson points out in comments over at Space Politics, one could simply substitute names and nyms of (black) programs here, and write exactly the same piece about NRO. But I’m not sure that I’d agree with Dr. Stern’s characterization that it is a NASA culture that has “lost control of spending.” Was there ever any golden age in which the NASA culture had control of spending? After all, the agency was born in the panic of the Cold War, and developed a cost-(plus)-is-no-object mentality from its very beginning. The operative saying during Apollo was “waste anything but time.” Sure, there have been occasional instances of programs coming in under schedule and within budget, but as Dr. Stern points out, the managers of those programs are often punished by having their programs slashed to cover overruns.

No, there is not now, and never has been a cost-conscious culture at NASA, for all the reasons that he describes. And this is the biggest one:

Congress should turn from the self-serving protection of local NASA jobs to an ethic of responsible government that delivers results.

Yes, it should. Well said. And with all the hope and change in the air, I’m sure that this will be the year that it finally happens.

OK, you can all stop laughing now. My sides hurt, too.

Unfortunately, that is not going to happen until space accomplishments become much more nationally important than they currently are, from a political standpoint. For most on the Hill, the NASA budget is first and foremost a jobs program for their states or districts. We can’t even control this kind of pork barrelery on the Defense budget (including NRO), which is actually a real federal responsibility, with lives at stake if we fail. Why should we think that we can fix it for civil space? Only when we are no longer reliant on federal budgets will we start to make serious progress, and get more efficiency in the program.

Speaking of which, Dr. Stern also has a piece in The Space Review on how NASA can make itself more relevant to the populace and its representatives in DC:

The coming new year presents an opportunity to reemphasize the immediate societal and economic returns NASA generates, so that no one asks, “How do space efforts make a tangible difference in my life?”

The new administration could accomplish this by combining NASA’s space exploration portfolio with new and innovative initiatives that address hazards to society, make new applications of space, and foster new industries.

Such new initiatives should include dramatically amplifying our capability to monitor the changing Earth in every form, from climate change to land use to the mitigation of natural disasters. Such an effort should also accelerate much needed innovation in aircraft and airspace system technologies that would save fuel, save travelers time, and regain American leadership in the commercial aerospace sector. And it should take greater responsibility for mitigating the potential hazards associated with solar storms and asteroid impacts.

So, too, a more relevant NASA should be charged to ignite the entrepreneurial human suborbital and orbital spaceflight industry. This nascent commercial enterprise promises to revolutionize how humans use spaceflight and how spaceflight benefits the private sector economy as fundamentally as the advent of satellites affected the communications industry.

As he notes, this needn’t mean a larger NASA budget–just a better-spent one. I particularly like the last graf above, obviously. I don’t agree, though, that it is NASA’s job to monitor the earth. It’s an important job, but it’s not really in NASA’s existing charter, and I fear that if it takes on this responsibility, it will further dilute the efforts on where its focus should be, which is looking outward, not down. It should be left to the agency that is actually responsible for such things (or at least part of them, and expanding its purview wouldn’t be as much of a stretch)–NOAA. If, for administrative reasons, NOAA is viewed as incapable of developing earth-sensing birds (though they couldn’t do much worse than NASA and NRO have recently), NASA could still manage this activity as a “contractor,” but it shouldn’t come out of their budget–it should be funded by Commerce.

Anyway, I think that we could do a lot worse than Dr. Stern as the next NASA administrator. We certainly done a lot worse.

[Early afternoon update]

The NYT piece is being discussed at NASAWatch, where John Mankins has a useful comment.

Talk at NASA about “human rating” an Ares V?

The decision to undertake the study reverses a major decision NASA took after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and subsequent accident investigation, that crew and cargo would be launched on separate vehicles. The Ares I, with its solid rocket booster first-stage and the new upper stage powered by the J-2X engine, was selected to orbit the Orion crew exploration vehicle.

That decision never made as much sense as everyone thought it did. It was one of the false lessons “learned” from Shuttle. And, as always, it raises the issue of what “human rating” really means. Generally, given the way the requirements often end up getting waived for NASA’s own vehicles, but not for other players, like the “Visiting Vehicle” rules for ISS, it’s simply an arbitrary barrier to entry for commercial providers.

[Monday morning update]

I should clarify that this discussion is about launch only. For in-space operations, it does make sense to separate passengers from cargo, and it probably makes sense to have robotic freighters as well, due to the long trip times and lack of need to handle emergencies with crew.

From Henry Spencer:

In its early years, the only form of manned space exploration it favoured was an (international) Mars expedition. All other ideas that involved humans in space were counterproductive and undesirable, to hear the Planetary Society tell it.

This obsession with Mars was a bad idea then, and it’s a bad idea now. However, some of the reasons advanced against it strike me as poor – sufficiently poor that they weaken attempts to argue for a more systematic and balanced space effort.

An exclusive focus on Mars does have one thing going for it. If you believe that any resumption of manned space exploration will inevitably end the way Apollo did, with follow-on programmes cancelled and flight-ready hardware consigned to museums as soon as the programme’s first objective is met, then choosing the most interesting single destination makes sense.

However . . . haven’t we learned anything from doing that once? To me, it makes far more sense to try to build a programme that won’t crash and burn as soon as it scores its first goal. That means systematically building capabilities and infrastructure, and doing first things first even if they aren’t the most exciting parts.

Unfortunately, we don’t seem to have the societal patience necessary to do the unexciting parts, at least if the government is paying for it. Which is why we have to get private industry going ASAP.

[Early afternoon update]

I mentioned yesterday that Paul Spudis wasn’t impressed with Lou Friedman’s thoughts. He’s similarly unimpressed with The Planetary Society’s new roadmap.

[Another update a few minutes later]

Jeff Plescia has been leaving this message in comments at various places (I’ve seen it at NASA Watch and Space Politics]

As a participant in the workshop sponsored by the Planetary Society at Stanford University in February, 2008, I feel obliged to make some comments with respect to what is said in portions of the Planetary Society document “Beyond the Moon A New Roadmap for Human Space Exploration.”

Page 5 contains the statement:
“Among the conclusions of this group is that ‘the purpose of sustained human exploration is to go to Mars and beyond,’ and that a series of intermediate destinations, each with its own intrinsic value, should be established as steps toward that goal. The consensus statements and viewpoints expressed by this group of experts form the basis for the principles and recommendations contained in this document.”

This statement is a blatant and intentionally dishonest misrepresentation of the recommendations and sentiments of the group.

We had extensive discussions about what the conclusion of the workshop might be. While the conclusion reported in the Roadmap was clearly the predisposition of several members of the group, particularly the organizers, it was definitively and clearly not the consensus of the group as a whole. In fact, when these words (or words to the same effect) were suggested, the group clearly indicated to the organizers that they should not be used because they were inaccurate. However, the organizers chose to ignore the group’s wishes at the end of the workshop, at the International Astronautical Congress and in the Roadmap in portraying the results of the workshop. This has occurred despite the fact that members of the group pointed out after the workshop press release that such statements were inappropriate and incorrect.

For what it’s worth. Thanks, Lou.

Maybe it’s like the climate change “consensus,” from which many scientists are now running.