That’s the title (except theirs is declarative, not interrogative) of an op-ed piece in the business section of today’s Journal (sorry, subscription required) by Holman Jenkins, in which he quotes yours truly, Henry Vanderbilt and Charles Lurio:

We put these views in the paper as a public service. NASA can be expected to dismiss them. Most of the media, bound up in its notion of legitimate “sources,” reports only the views of NASA, the lobbying sector and the congressional delegations whose main interest is keeping the pork flowing.

Political reality is that government does not admit mistakes, briskly decide not to throw good money after bad, junk failing organizations and start over with a clean sheet. That’s what business does.

To his credit, and at the risk of ridicule, NASA’s Mr. Griffin has at least given the best explanation of why space colonization is important: survival of the species over the long term. Yet already visible is the unworkable budget logic that’s destined remorselessly to deflate NASA’s conceit that only a government-led program, at a cost of billions of dollars per astronaut, can get personnel and equipment the first 100 miles of whatever journeys we take to elsewhere in the solar system.

NASA’s core competence, which Mr. Griffin is fighting to retain, consists of treating space as fit terrain for occasional budgetary blowouts, with the inevitable intervening hangovers.

This may be a way to keep its massive civil service and contractor armies together. But it’s the enemy of routine access to earth orbit, which would allow space finally to become a thriving part of our human economy and make it affordable to contemplate a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars.

Note the new media flavor. Also, go check out Henry’s latest thoughts (probably not a permalink):

This plan is crippled from the start, in that it doesn’t contemplate more than minor trims and reshuffles of the current Shuttle/Station standing army, and it calls for development of not one but two major new NASA-proprietary launch vehicles rather than working with existing US and world commercial launch assets. The combination ensures costs will be far too high for the program to have any chance of doing sustainable deep-space exploration over the long term – possibly too high to allow NASA to even make it past the first major hurdle, simultaneous winddown of Shuttle/Station and development of the oversized new “CEV” Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay and the large new CLV launcher to lift it.

[Update at mid morning]

This part bears a little comment:

It may not be important in the grand scheme of things, a $16 billion a year agency. But one thing has changed: There’s now a popular constituency for space policy that does more than just tune in for the blast-off extravaganzas. Blame the Web: We told you last year how seething space fans had kept Congress’s feet to the fire and ended up saving a bill designed to speed development of private space tourism.

The same folks are also a source of critique of NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study, issued last month, mostly in consultation with the usual suspects — the giant aerospace contractors, who’ve been NASA’s primary iron triangle sounding board since Gemini. Now there’s an effective peanut gallery, their voices magnified by the Web, which has sprouted numerous sites devoted to criticizing and kibitzing about NASA.

This plan actually wasn’t in consultation with the usual suspects, or at least not all of them (other than probably ATK-Thiokol for the SRB, and Lockmart for ET mods). At least in Boeing’s case, this architecture is not at all what they recommended in their architecture studies. The sixty-day study was strictly a NASA-internal activity, initiated and led by Mike Griffin and Doug Stanley, and as far as I can tell, they paid little attention to industry input, except what they needed from the contractors named above to flesh out their Shuttle-derived designs.

[4 PM EDT update]

Instapundit has more excerpts, including the quotes.

That’s the title (except theirs is declarative, not interrogative) of an op-ed piece in the business section of today’s Journal (sorry, subscription required) by Holman Jenkins, in which he quotes yours truly, Henry Vanderbilt and Charles Lurio:

We put these views in the paper as a public service. NASA can be expected to dismiss them. Most of the media, bound up in its notion of legitimate “sources,” reports only the views of NASA, the lobbying sector and the congressional delegations whose main interest is keeping the pork flowing.

Political reality is that government does not admit mistakes, briskly decide not to throw good money after bad, junk failing organizations and start over with a clean sheet. That’s what business does.

To his credit, and at the risk of ridicule, NASA’s Mr. Griffin has at least given the best explanation of why space colonization is important: survival of the species over the long term. Yet already visible is the unworkable budget logic that’s destined remorselessly to deflate NASA’s conceit that only a government-led program, at a cost of billions of dollars per astronaut, can get personnel and equipment the first 100 miles of whatever journeys we take to elsewhere in the solar system.

NASA’s core competence, which Mr. Griffin is fighting to retain, consists of treating space as fit terrain for occasional budgetary blowouts, with the inevitable intervening hangovers.

This may be a way to keep its massive civil service and contractor armies together. But it’s the enemy of routine access to earth orbit, which would allow space finally to become a thriving part of our human economy and make it affordable to contemplate a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars.

Note the new media flavor. Also, go check out Henry’s latest thoughts (probably not a permalink):

This plan is crippled from the start, in that it doesn’t contemplate more than minor trims and reshuffles of the current Shuttle/Station standing army, and it calls for development of not one but two major new NASA-proprietary launch vehicles rather than working with existing US and world commercial launch assets. The combination ensures costs will be far too high for the program to have any chance of doing sustainable deep-space exploration over the long term – possibly too high to allow NASA to even make it past the first major hurdle, simultaneous winddown of Shuttle/Station and development of the oversized new “CEV” Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay and the large new CLV launcher to lift it.

[Update at mid morning]

This part bears a little comment:

It may not be important in the grand scheme of things, a $16 billion a year agency. But one thing has changed: There’s now a popular constituency for space policy that does more than just tune in for the blast-off extravaganzas. Blame the Web: We told you last year how seething space fans had kept Congress’s feet to the fire and ended up saving a bill designed to speed development of private space tourism.

The same folks are also a source of critique of NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study, issued last month, mostly in consultation with the usual suspects — the giant aerospace contractors, who’ve been NASA’s primary iron triangle sounding board since Gemini. Now there’s an effective peanut gallery, their voices magnified by the Web, which has sprouted numerous sites devoted to criticizing and kibitzing about NASA.

This plan actually wasn’t in consultation with the usual suspects, or at least not all of them (other than probably ATK-Thiokol for the SRB, and Lockmart for ET mods). At least in Boeing’s case, this architecture is not at all what they recommended in their architecture studies. The sixty-day study was strictly a NASA-internal activity, initiated and led by Mike Griffin and Doug Stanley, and as far as I can tell, they paid little attention to industry input, except what they needed from the contractors named above to flesh out their Shuttle-derived designs.

[4 PM EDT update]

Instapundit has more excerpts, including the quotes.

That’s the title (except theirs is declarative, not interrogative) of an op-ed piece in the business section of today’s Journal (sorry, subscription required) by Holman Jenkins, in which he quotes yours truly, Henry Vanderbilt and Charles Lurio:

We put these views in the paper as a public service. NASA can be expected to dismiss them. Most of the media, bound up in its notion of legitimate “sources,” reports only the views of NASA, the lobbying sector and the congressional delegations whose main interest is keeping the pork flowing.

Political reality is that government does not admit mistakes, briskly decide not to throw good money after bad, junk failing organizations and start over with a clean sheet. That’s what business does.

To his credit, and at the risk of ridicule, NASA’s Mr. Griffin has at least given the best explanation of why space colonization is important: survival of the species over the long term. Yet already visible is the unworkable budget logic that’s destined remorselessly to deflate NASA’s conceit that only a government-led program, at a cost of billions of dollars per astronaut, can get personnel and equipment the first 100 miles of whatever journeys we take to elsewhere in the solar system.

NASA’s core competence, which Mr. Griffin is fighting to retain, consists of treating space as fit terrain for occasional budgetary blowouts, with the inevitable intervening hangovers.

This may be a way to keep its massive civil service and contractor armies together. But it’s the enemy of routine access to earth orbit, which would allow space finally to become a thriving part of our human economy and make it affordable to contemplate a permanent human presence on the moon and Mars.

Note the new media flavor. Also, go check out Henry’s latest thoughts (probably not a permalink):

This plan is crippled from the start, in that it doesn’t contemplate more than minor trims and reshuffles of the current Shuttle/Station standing army, and it calls for development of not one but two major new NASA-proprietary launch vehicles rather than working with existing US and world commercial launch assets. The combination ensures costs will be far too high for the program to have any chance of doing sustainable deep-space exploration over the long term – possibly too high to allow NASA to even make it past the first major hurdle, simultaneous winddown of Shuttle/Station and development of the oversized new “CEV” Shuttle-minus-the-payload-bay and the large new CLV launcher to lift it.

[Update at mid morning]

This part bears a little comment:

It may not be important in the grand scheme of things, a $16 billion a year agency. But one thing has changed: There’s now a popular constituency for space policy that does more than just tune in for the blast-off extravaganzas. Blame the Web: We told you last year how seething space fans had kept Congress’s feet to the fire and ended up saving a bill designed to speed development of private space tourism.

The same folks are also a source of critique of NASA’s Exploration Systems Architecture Study, issued last month, mostly in consultation with the usual suspects — the giant aerospace contractors, who’ve been NASA’s primary iron triangle sounding board since Gemini. Now there’s an effective peanut gallery, their voices magnified by the Web, which has sprouted numerous sites devoted to criticizing and kibitzing about NASA.

This plan actually wasn’t in consultation with the usual suspects, or at least not all of them (other than probably ATK-Thiokol for the SRB, and Lockmart for ET mods). At least in Boeing’s case, this architecture is not at all what they recommended in their architecture studies. The sixty-day study was strictly a NASA-internal activity, initiated and led by Mike Griffin and Doug Stanley, and as far as I can tell, they paid little attention to industry input, except what they needed from the contractors named above to flesh out their Shuttle-derived designs.

[4 PM EDT update]

Instapundit has more excerpts, including the quotes.

Keith Cowing says that this is more bad news for NASA, but I disagree. If the cause was worker carelessness, at least we now know what it is, and it’s easily fixable, by retraining workers, or hiring new ones. Ideally, of course, you’d like to have a system that’s not so sensitive to the individuals who have to implement it, but at some point, the people are part of it, and you have to look for quality there as well.

Over at Reason, Ted Balaker takes a whack at NASA. It’s not always fair:

When I interviewed him earlier this year, X Prize winner Burt Rutan pointed out that after almost half a century of manned space flight, NASA still hasn’t achieved the kind of safety breakthroughs his small team achieved in a just a few years. Take the “care-free re-entry” design. It allows Rutan’s SpaceShipOne to align itself automatically for reentry, making it much safer to plunge back into the earth’s atmosphere. Although Rutan’s ship only returns from suborbital space, the design takes the traditionally complex process of reentry and makes it simple.

Emphasis mine. That “although” makes all the difference. Burt’s approach wouldn’t work for an orbital entry, and it’s not a valid comparison. Entry from orbit is a tough problem, and it’s going to take a lot of experience and approaches to figure out how to do it safely.

And when he writes:

…when they’re not swimming in tax dollars, inventors come to appreciate the value of simplicity. Take the hatch, for example. Private astronaut Brian Binnie explained to The Space Review’s Eric Hedman that SpaceShipOne’s hatch opens inward and has no moving parts. Binnie estimates that it costs a couple hundred bucks. Compare that to the multimillion dollar shuttle hatch which swings outward and requires complicated mechanisms to seal it for flight.

While the principle of parsimony is good, this is a dumb example. NASA’s hatch designs are a legacy of the Apollo I fire. I hope that Burt doesn’t kill too many people before he figures out that there are sometimes good reasons for the way NASA does things.

I do agree with this, though, at least in concept if not detail:

How many cosmic hints does NASA need to realize that it might not be long before it’s eclipsed by space entrepreneurs? If it wants to stay in the game, NASA should move from player to manager: Spell out the mission, offer a nice reward for its completion, and kick back until someone collects the dough. NASA could borrow from a suggestion made by the Aldridge Report, itself the result of a presidential commission, and offer, say, $1 billion “to the first organization to place humans on the Moon and sustain them for a fixed period.”