propforce,<br /><br />It seems to me that NASA has not had a clear-cut goal, with dedicated funding to acheive it, since the days of the Apollo program. Since then, it has been a mixture of having the agency setting its own goals, and then trying to justify them to Congress, and 'corporate welfare' projects mandated by Congress, which inexplicably always lose funding when it comes to actually building hardware.<br /><br />NASA seems to be one of the few, if not the only, major government programs which has to establish its worthiness for continued funding, year after year. And Congress does not seem to realize that doing only one thing at a time means accomplishing nothing. Instead of beginning construction of a space station in 1983, which is what the space shuttle would have been fairly good at, Congress dragged its feet, turned down several excellent designs, and finally agreed to the International Space Station only because of pressure from other nations. Of course, the space shuttle is now over 20 years old, which, for a protoype vehicle, is astounding, and needs frequent upgrades to maintain effectiveness.<br /><br />If Congress were to give NASA a specific goal, such as building a base on the Moon, and guarentee funding for 5 year blocks of time, I believe that NASA would function properly. In the environment which it has to operate at this time, I think that its performance is entirely typical of a large government agency.<br /><br />And if you think that the government is getting bilked by NASA, consider the Drug Enforcement Agency. Its annual budget is about the same as NASA's, yet since its inception, it has had absolutey no effectiveness in its stated mission, according to its own operatives. Sure, they are doing something, but it is having zero success in accomplishing what the agency was created to do. That would be like NASA never flying any hardware whatsoever, just doing endless design studies. The Mars Rovers, the Cassini probe, the International <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> The secret to peace of mind is a short attention span. </div>