perfidy

In response to the comments on my NASA post of yesterday, here are some extended thoughts on the situation. I do not think that the formula for success in NASA lies in control of spending. NASA wastes money, and this is a concern. It is also a concern that NASA has no real means for even determining how much money it spends, and on what. But this is the least of their problems. Overspending was the third and last problem that I mentioned, and in the interest of brevity I didn't explain what I meant by that. The overspending that I had in mind is a NASA-specific kind of waste. NASA wastes billions of dollars on designing, planning, redesigning and yet more redesigning. The ISS was redesigned, what, five times in the twenty years before it was built? NASA seems to have a distinct aversion to actually building things.

But this is really only a small part of the total problem that is NASA. There is nothing really that can be done to fix it, because NASA is a government bureaucracy and therefore largely immune to change. Further, even if the Public, the President and Congress gave NASA an inspiring, all-consuming mission, and a butload of cash to achieve it; they still would have all the same problems. Lack of vision is inherent in bureaucracy. Lack of innovation and NIMBYism is par for the course. People go on and on about what a stupendous success Apollo was, usually so they can set up a stunning indictment of the current NASA. But the history of Apollo was one of political motives, awkward technical and mission compromises, and general rhetorical grandstanding. (It was also a stupendous achievement, but all of the seeds of NASA's current problems began in the sixties.)

In the early days of aviation, NACA (The National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics) was a government body that published basic and practical research on aeronautics, and on aviation. Private firms hoping to get funding from banks and venture capitalists could point to a NACA study and say, "See, the government says it can be done, it's practical." Then they'd get their cash, and build an airplane or whatever. NASA needs to do this for all the companies that would dearly love to get into space transportation, rather than jealously guarding its space monopoly with the connivance of the FAA and the DOD.

NASA could quite successfully send out robotic probes, do solar and deep space astronomy, and publish bleeding edge research on aerospace science and engineering. Especially if they weren't saddled with the economic, budgetary and political albatross of running the space shuttle program. The only way to get around the deeply ingrained institutional problems of NASA is to, well, go around them.