Allen Thomson wrote:
Just read it, and it's excellent. I wonder who "anonymous" is.

Usenet isn't totally dead, but it sure has gone downhill since a
decade ago -- and the S/N was remarkably low even then. Oh, well, as
long as there's a searchable archive it's still useful as a filing
cabinet.

That really was a good discussion.
I think one of the problems NASA has is that if you try to cut anything
at all, you've stepped on someone's toes, and they will take it to their
congressperson and get it reinstated. So NASA embodies the Peter
Principle; it's risen to the level of its own bureaucratic
iincompetence, and if you give it more money it just starts frittering
it away on more pork-barrel programs, so that it is in a perpetual state
of being underfunded no matter how much money is tossed at it.
It might be best to just let the thing die, and then start over with
something a lot more modest that only does a few things, but does them
well, sort of like going over to the old NACA model.
A lot of the "research" NASA funds is public works programs for industry
and academia plain and simple.
They had one guy I saw on television years ago who was studying Martian
life by skiing around in the California mountains while gathering up
snow samples. California isn't Mars by a long shot. You want him to get
some good data, send him to the summit of Mt. Erebus in antarctic
winter... that's a tad more like Mars...what he'd gotten was a taxpayer
financed ski vacation.
And what this dorky underwater habitat stuff is about is beyond me:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewnews.html?id=1215

Pat