perfidy

It may be a lame, pollyannaesque effort on my part to see some good in this; but there is a part of me that actually feels hopeful after reading this:

The space shuttle and International Space Station — nearly the whole of the U.S. manned space program for the past three decades — were mistakes, NASA chief Michael Griffin said Tuesday.

Well, duh. Space advocates have been saying that for decades. Three of them, in fact.

Some other choice bits:

Griffin said NASA lost its way in the 1970s, when the agency ended the Apollo moon missions in favor of developing the shuttle and space station, which can only orbit Earth.

"It is now commonly accepted that was not the right path," Griffin said.

Only now is the nation's space program getting back on track, Griffin said. He announced last week that NASA aims to send astronauts back to the moon in 2018 in a spacecraft that would look like the Apollo capsule.

Joe Rothenberg, head of NASA's manned space programs from 1995 to 2001, defended the programs for providing lessons about how to operate in space. But he conceded that "in hindsight, there may have been other ways."

So, NASA admits that we're hitting the big red reset button and going back to somewhere in the neighborhood of 1975. It's a do-over. Never mind the fourteen deaths and $150 billion we wasted on the shuttle, and the $100 billion wasted on a nearly useless ISS.

There were several major problems with NASA development programs over the last three misguided decades. First, doctrinaire approaches to design problems. Pick a solution and make it fit, regardless of other considerations. A procrustean space program. Second, an unwillingness to use traditional design methodologies. The design/test/build/repeat cycle is almost entirely absent from NASA programs, except for a few aeronautical research projects. Build early and build often is how you figure out how to do things. Repeatedly spending millions to billions on empty paper designs that are never built is job security for government drones.

Change these things, and even the decision to go with the Shuttle could have been redeemed. The basic architecture of the Shuttle system is more or less sound. Certainly not much less sound than other launch vehicles. Large rockets do have a tendency to explode. But where was the experimentation? We never tested other configurations or cargo versions of the base shuttle stack. We never lofted the fuel tanks into orbit to see if they could be used as habitats We never added hardware to the system, incrementally modifying the orbiter - let alone experimented with new orbiters that could be used with variants of the shuttle stack. We never tinkered. Nothing was done. We simply kept using the same configuration until it blew up. Then we kept using it until it blew up again. Then we started using it again. What's that definition of mental illness? Doing the same thing over and and over but expecting different results?

The tragedy of the death of the Apollo program is that those clever rocket scientists who got us to the moon had thousands of clever ideas for what to do with the hardware we'd developed. Skylab was just one of them, and that got into orbit more by inertia than will. But we scrapped all that, and went with the shuttle. There have been many ideas for what could be done with shuttle hardware, but none have been pursued. And now we are on the verge of scrapping this system without even having a follow on just like we did in the late seventies.

Given that the people at NASA are actually rocket scientists, this behavior is hard to explain.