tanstaafl76":12u2gudr said:
Over the years NASA has become a self-serving bureaucracy to some degree, and that certainly was apparent from the moment they decided to cancel Shuttle and came up with Constellation as the next step. Constellation was not exciting, not particularly new, and not done on a very ambitious timeline. It over-promised, under-delivered, and became so disconnected from fiscal reality that it became a joke. It was a wasteful idea that accomplished little except keep people busy for a half a decade.
I like the approach for using commercial rockets to get to orbit. What NASA needs to do, if it wants to remain relevant and regain some of its prestige, is to truly break some new ground in the realm of exploration. New propulsion systems, new ideas for human space exploration. Not Apollo 2.0, which is more or less what we were getting with Constellation even if it was successful, which it wouldn't have been.
The recent decision by the Obama administration is realistically the best out of a lot of bad options. NASA currently lacks the vision to justify substantially increasing its budget, and if the decision to cancel Constellation hadn't been made now, I firmly believe it would have eventually been cancelled anyway when the timeline became unmanageable and the fiscal fantasies started unraveling.
tanstaafl76
It wasn’t NASA that cancelled the Space Shuttle; it was President George W. Bush that cancelled it. The shuttle should have been cancelled due to issues with its TPS and being side mounted on a super cooled tank that shed ice and damaged its tiles, but he cancelled it due to fiscal reasons.
NASA also didn’t come up with Constellation perse; again President George W. Bush announced the return of the United States to the Moon in a bid to bolster public support for his flagging administration. It was basically un-funded by the Bush administration and NASA did what it could with what they had. NASA decided that to do the job with the money they could free up after the shuttle retired, they wouldn’t re-invent the wheel and just go with what could easily be achieved for another boots and flag program.
However, even an Apollo program 2.0 is rather complex and requires broad public and administrative support. However, as time went on, it was obvious that those goals were not going to be met in a timely manner. In the 60’s there was support for spending a lot of money for a program such as Apollo due to the Red Scare, but that didn’t work the same way in the 90’s. Although there is still a threat from Iran and North Korea and their IRBM and ICBM technologies, there isn’t much of a race now to see who is better. Now, public and political pressure for a successful moon landing project isn’t behind a push to go to the moon, which hurt the project in numerous ways, such as budget cuts and apathy. Beyond that the reason for a Moon landing isn’t as clear cut anymore either. Even in the 60’s once humanity reached the moon, public support slowed, and the last three Apollo missions were cancelled, despite the hardware and training that had gone into them. A repeat of Apollo in this century won’t prove anything new either, and would have likely ended the same way.
So the next time we go to the Moon if it isn’t done with a private program with its own agenda’s such as making money from it, I don’t see a public program doing it. Private industry will likely be a better choice for space technology anyway, because it is freed from the constraints of public funding and self serving politicians. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that NASA will be out of the space business either – several programs that will be brought up will be focusing on robotics and orbital stations, as well as investigating new equipment and technology, which will undoubtedly help create a base for further exploration to the moon and the solar system.
I agree with the rest of your post, but wanted to make sure NASA isn’t held at fault for something they didn’t really have much say about.