perfidy

Over at Space.com, I read that Burt Rutan has said of the proposed NASA CEV, that it is more like archaeology than rocket science. All too true, and I nearly aspirated my diet coke.

Other choice quotes:

“They are forcing the program to be done with technology that we already know works. They are not creating an environment where it is possible to have a breakthrough,” Rutan advised. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, contending that programs must encourage risks “in order to stumble into breakthroughs.”

...Rutan said if he was the NASA Administrator, he would call a major press conference about the agency plans to go back to the Moon. “I’d go in front of the microphone,” Rutan said, “and I’d scream at the top of my lungs, ‘this is stupid,’ then turn around and head back to the office and go back to work. If we copy what we had it won’t be affordable enough or safe enough,” Rutan said, to foster human space travel beyond low Earth orbit, to the Moon, and outward.

NASA’s space shuttle is complex and generically dangerous, Rutan pointed out. Still, not flying the shuttle to the Hubble Space Telescope is symbolic of a larger issue. “The budget forecast [for NASA] is to go out and spend hundreds of billions of dollar to go to Mars and yet you don’t have the courage to go back to the Hubble … it looks like you got the wrong guys doing it,” Rutan concluded.

If there is a benevolent and loving God watching over us, the government will not get in his way, and we will have real space travel in our lifetime. You figure the odds, 'cause Rutan just pissed off a lot of people. All the more so because he is exactly right.