Just A Few Points
Apparently, being an expert nowadays requires no actual knowledge.
I'm basically just picking this article as a random example, since it makes a good number of the stupid points that are pretty common nowadays. Anway, here's a few thoughts:

• Space travel costs money. This is not a direct response to anything in the article, just a good thing to remember.
  
• Culture and direction are not the same thing. "The problem is that as long as there’s a space shuttle and an I.S.S. the NASA culture will never change." The cultural issues addressed by the CAIB are not intrinsically linked to Shuttle and ISS. In fact, some of the same cultural issues could be found in NASA before the Apollo 1 fire--essentially, an insufficient focus on safety stemming from an overconfidence in hardware stemming from past performance. Even if there's a problem with something, if it works, it's easy to assume it will continue to work. Trust me, I've demonstrated the same "culture" with my car more times than I can count. That said, you can change that attitude while working with the same hardware.
  
• The Chicken And The Egg. "The space station was designed to be a destination for the shuttle (as well as Russian spacecraft)" Well, um, no. Yes, the first launch of the Shuttle predates the first launch of ISS hardware by 18 years, so I can see where that would be an easy mistake for the uninformed to make. But, in fact, it's very well documented that the goal of having a Space Station was the driving force behind the design and creation of the Space Shuttle. Further, the notion I've seen several times of the Shuttle needing somewhere to go is just ridiculous. Shuttle got by for 18 years without having a destination other than orbit. And I can only imagine how amused the RSA would be at the notion that its interest in participating in ISS was solely so that Soyuz craft would finally have a place to go.
  
• Stepping Stones "Still, NASA’s culture is based on sending people up to the station, keeping an eye on them as they spin around the Earth, and bringing them back." If this guy had been running NASA in the 60s, in the unlikely event that we ever made it to the Moon, it would have taken much longer and cost much more. The argument he's making about ISS could just as easily have been made about the Gemini program. The Apollo program was going to take people to the Moon. So why waste time on Gemini, that just flies around the Earth like Mercury did? Why waste time on things like EVAs, in-space rendezvous, and microgravity duration research? Well, because you have to know those things before you can land on the Moon.
  
• Mandates "The agency has no plans to go any further, to send people to Mars, to Venus, or to the edge of our Solar System." NASA can't provide it's on mandates. It just doesn't work, any more than I could develop plans to spend one month a year in Tahiti. Without the funding, it's just not going to happen. The agency can plan to do whatever it wants, Washington has to approve the money. Going back to this guy's original paragraph, NASA wasn't the one that decided it had accomplished all it could on the Moon. NASA had the next lunar missions already lined up. That's the once criticism of NASA that bugs me most, is the notion that the agency has no desire to go anywhere. If Congress ever came out and said, "Look, NASA, we want you to go to Mars, here's the funding you need, we promise we're not going to cut it next year," how long do you think it would take the agency to start working on plans for interplanetary travel? As it is, the agency is doing what it can, performing research that can be used when those doors are open.
  
• Yeah, sure. "There’s little difference between John Glenn’s historic first flight in 1962 and a modern-day space shuttle mission." That one's so wrong it's hard to even address it. Two things are the same: Where they are, and the approximate speed that they're travelling. In other words, if you're walking through your local Apple store, there's very little difference between you're experience and that of the first explorers to walk through the wilderness once in that same location.
  
• Impressed With Space Flight "When Columbia exploded, we were reminded that people are risking their lives for our space program. And if we’re going to ask them to do that, we’d better make sure the potential reward is worth the sizable risk." Um... are we forcing people to go into space. Every astronaut NASA has ever had has known there was a "sizable risk" involved in what they were doing. Every member of the STS-107 crew had heard of Challenger. But they all fly anyway. For them, spaceflight is its own reward--An experience unlike anything else on Earth, something that far less than 0.00001 percent of the world's population has ever experience.
  
• The Briar Patch "We should send NASA back to the drawing board, and order it to come up with plans to escape our orbit." Oh, yeah, how bad would we hate that?
  
• Sundry "Maybe the I.S.S. can somehow be retooled and used as a space-based launching pad." Oh, crap, why didn't we think of that decades ago? With this guy, who would have needed von Braun. "Otherwise it should be abandoned and allowed to come down." Um, sure, that's a good investment. "To get there, we’d need new types of rockets, new spacecraft, and a new astronaut-training program. It would probably take many years, and cost billions." Have I mentioned this guy's a freakin' genius? "It’s time to think big. We should be exploring space. But unfortunately we’ll never get out there if all we’re doing is sending people up to the I.S.S. to travel in circles." Remember, kids--preparation, practice, and hard work will never get you anywhere.

:: :: 10:24 :: David :: [permalink] ::