Dean's World

Er... isn't that a little defeatist?

I agree that we need a new shuttle system. I also agree that companies would probably be more efficient at it. However, the private aeronautics industry is still in its infancy. It would not be economical (let alone safe) to allow these companies to launch entire crews of astronauts into orbit.

There is, but the federal government isn't very willing to cough up the money necessary to FUND a better way... at least not quickly.

Another thing, Dean, is that space will be militarized, whether we like it or not. The government will always need a way to use its own rockets to get top secret payloads into orbit.

I love to follow the shuttle, because it's the only game in town.

I hate what NASA has become, because the shuttle's the only game in town. That's inexcusable.

I had a coworker who was a former engineer. The entire time she worked there, she had one assignment: calculating trajectories so they could be sure that, in the event of an accident or ejection, nothing would land in alligator breeding beds. If the beds might be hit, no launch. This talented engineer never once got to work on actual launch systems or vehicles, because no one at NASA wanted to risk the political fallout of a broken alligator egg.

While she worked there, her friends in other departments were working on various plans and blueprints for new programs and projects. When she went to visit them eight years later, they were working on the same plans and blueprints for the same programs and projects. Not one bit of real hardware had been built and launched; but lots of meetings had been held, and no one had taken a single step that had the potential to embarass any higher up.

NASA has lost its spirit, its spine, its vision, and its purpose. There are still good people there, including astronauts who are ready and willing to risk their lives; but the agency as a whole won't take any risks to its existence.

And in some sense, I can't blame them. After all, Proxmire, Mondale, and company punished NASA for their greatest success. They went to the Moon in a decade, and got their budget slashed and their very purpose questioned as a reward. That trains managers not to succeed, because success makes you a more visible target.

NASA needs an entirely new program, to prompt aerospace companies--from little ones like Scaled Composites to big ones like McDonnell Douglass--to build spaceworthy crafts, anything from single-use orbital rockets to reusable crafts--to come up with the designs themselves, and simply pay them to get stuff into orbit for them. Or if someone can come up with a cheap reusable craft that can make it to orbit, offer to buy a certain number of them.

In short, it's time they stop trying to build things and concentrate on research and exploration projects, relying on private industry to get them where they want to go.

It's the only way we're going to see real progress.

I'm sorry, Dean, I misunderstood what you mean. I thought you were advocating dissolving NASA and turning sapce exploration entirely over to private enterprise.

If you're talking about having private companies DESIGN vessels for NASA well, I think that's a very good idea.

I've been here all along Michael, thanks. The shuttle was designed in partnership with NASA, not designed from the ground up and run past NASA for a purchasing decision. And the shuttle's the perfect example of a designed-by-committee mess. It was never a very good vehicle and it's now just a damned joke, a white elephant we're afraid to get rid of.

They need to completely gut the shuttle program and start over, with mission #1 being that they won't be involved in the design at all. They'll just pay to get things into orbit and when someone's got a reusable vehicle ready to sell they can place orders for it if they want.

NASA never lost a man in spaceflight until Challenger. The only accident before that was one on the ground due to careless use of pure oxygen in an area where there might be sparks.

The shuttle's been a complete technological nightmare and mess from day one.

As for getting people back to earth safely: Burt Rutan's not only done it, but he pledges to build a vehicle that will get people into orbit and back both more cheaply and far more safely than ever in history. The difference between Rutan and NASA being that Rutan and his people know what the hell they're doing and actually have a unified vision, while NASA is just one big ass-covering bureaucratic mess.

Rutan's done it once. NASA has done that too.
And Rutan "pledges" that he'll do better? That settles it!

Martin L. Shoemaker wrote:
"And in some sense, I can't blame them. After all, Proxmire, Mondale, and company punished NASA for their greatest success. They went to the Moon in a decade, and got their budget slashed and their very purpose questioned as a reward. That trains managers not to succeed, because success makes you a more visible target."

Ayn Rand commented on that back then, saw it as one of the great tragedies of our age. The government punishes its own greatest achievement by cutting money -- while pouring good money after bad, as they say, into failing welfare programs and failing public schools. If a private business did that, they'd be out of business.