Charles Buckley wrote in message ...
Eric Chomko wrote:

Ool ) wrote:
: "Eric Chomko" wrote in message ...
: Hansel ) wrote:


snip
: Come on, twenty-five years of using the same old jalopies until the
: oldest of them all eventually breaks apart means there must be *some*
: roadblock to progress somewhere...!

Agreed, NASA needs more money to run efficiently.



I'll have to disagree on that point. The last thing that NASA
needs is more money. It has not used what it has efficiently.
More money just means more money.

NASA has *never* operated a large program within it's budget
and it has never even met it's own internal estimates on cost.
It does a lot better with smaller, focussed, programs, but it
still tends to use more money to add more complexity.

The key words here a "large program." NACA got the job
of being NASA, because it served the civilian and military
aviation industry so well and so selflessly. NACA never really
has any large programs comparable to Mercury, Gemini, Apollo,
Space Shuttle or ISS. What we need is a NACAA--a decentralized
Advisory Committee with largely independent research centers
that compete and cooperate on a lot of small research projects.

Case in
point.. OSP was a straight forward program with a specific technical
goal. Yet, three separate NASA centers had separate offices specifically
for that program - and as far as I can tell, none were subservient to
any of the others. Hardly efficient.

When it comes to true, innovative, competitive research, there
is no such thing as duplication. The problem is that we have
OSPs, NASPS, Space Shuttles, etc. that are preconceived solutions
to a basic problem--rather than truly competitive approaches to
a basic problem such as the need for frequent, reliable, low-cost
access to space. And for this basic problem, it is way past time
that private industry should be supplying efficient space transportion
in response to government-generated and commercial-generated
markets for large amounts of tonnage to LEO at low cost.

This type of infrastructure would allow an NACAA to do
very ambitious space exploration at far lower cost than is
now being projected going back to the moon and manned
explorations to Mars. With the proper, commercially-oriented
space transportation infrastructure, space exploration would
not have to be a budget-busting, all-consuming program. I
would envisage a number of relatively small projects--not
programs--conducted by more than one NACAA research center.

To get a feel for an organization, you have to look at how it has
operated in the past. What sections are the most efficient? What
happened to areas when they recieved a budget increase? What happened
when budgets decreased? NASA does not fare well in that sort of
analysis. NASA deliberately lied to congress about the costs of
developing Shuttle rather than build a Shuttle that they could
afford to build. NASA completely botched NASP and Space Station
Freedom on technical issues.

NACA peformed very well. NASA has been a huge bureaucracy
since 1959, when I worked at NASA headquarters. I worked as a
summer intern at NACA Ames in 1952--what a world of difference.
Too much money for oversize programs has been the problem--not
the reverse.

Best regards,
Len (Cormier)
PanAero, Inc.
(change x to len)
( http://www.tour2space.com )