NASA a new look??

[gawin]

The powers that be need to take NASA apart peice by peice and re assemble it back into a venue of manned space exploration and advancement.<br /><br />The unmaned portion of NASA has done some great things and had many great acomplishments in the last 20 years. Every thing from the mars rovers out lasting thier expected life spans by more then a year to hitting a commet at thousands of miles an hour from millions of miles away.<br /><br />Thier manned program is dismal at best. The shuutle its self is a good platform and a great idea. It is also 20+ years old. Thier have been many ideas sence then but none have realy had the full press support needed to bring them to fruition. NASA has also suffered a few black eyes in thier manned program. Launching a shuttle when an engineer who knew it shouldnt have been launched said it souldnt was compleetly ignored. This was not NASA's fault directly as the manufacture of the SRB chose to ignore thier engineer and told NASA it was safe to fly. I still lay some of the blame on NASA for not having anyone on the staff knoledgable in the booster rockets enough to make the decision to not fly.<br />Now on to the recent shuttle problem. I here over and over that they reduced shedding by 80%. this tells me that shedding has been a problem that they tracked in the past for they had to have numbers to compare this with. now here is my main critisim with this. From the very first sign that the ET was sheeding foam that could or was striking the shuttle NASA should have put in place a program of re working the failing system for each and every successive launch untill the problem was no longer happining. so if they improved it by a meer 10% each launch then in a matter of very short time they would no longer have had a problem. any other type of industry if your paroduct has somthing that is failing every time its used you re design and try it again till it no longer fails.<br /><br />I understand that space flight is a very high risk venture a

 

[frodo1008]

It is somewhat peculiar that many scientists do not realize their peril here. If NASA would do as you suggest and divorce themselves of the robotic space science sections of their programs, and perhaps give these operations over to NSA, the purely scientific projects that are not taking pretty pictures that the public can understand will be curtailed to a great degree. Despite its appatent disarray, it IS the manned space flight of NASA that pays for the pure scientific projects NOT the other way around! <br /><br />The average American taxpayer could care less about projects that sometimes interest scientists greatly. For instance, a satellite that sends back very interesting scientific data on something like gamma rays isn't of the slightest interest for the average American truck driver. This is not knocking the truck driver, he just has other interests than scientific endeavers, unless they could give him a better truck!<br /><br />However, he might just be interested in the manned programs, as he believes that it could affect the future for his children and grand children. This is a concept that is easy for everybody to understand, not just scentists. And it IS this interest that eventually escalates up to congress interest, and funding!