On Jan 8, 4:25 pm, (Rand Simberg) wrote:
On Mon, 08 Jan 2007 15:16:00 -0600, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

Rand thinks that NASA should be using its money to support small-scale
rocket developers, and that this will usher in a glorious new age.
How would you like to be the guy at NASA who implements that plan? Who,
after going over all those failed private schemes to build the Wonderful
Miracle Rocket over the past few decades, and what happened to each of
them, decides to kick a billion or so off the agency's funds in that
direction?How would that be worse than the billion dollars of agency funds that
got kicked in the X-33 direction? Or the hundreds of billions that
have been squandered in the business-as-usual direction?

What do you think the odds are that a few years down the road, you're
going to be having a little heart-to-heart with a Congressional
subcommittee explaining why you have zip to show for that money, because
the companies you invested in were either incompetent or outright crooked?
By past experience, around 95%.I don't see very many in trouble now for all the hundreds of billions
that NASA has wasted. They only seem to get in trouble when they kill
astronauts, or attempt to move jobs from one district to another.

Apparently you haven't been paying attention.

NASA isn't some fiendish force squashing spaceflight, NASA is just smart
enough to put its money into companies that it knows have a good chance
of succeeding based on past experience, rather than on some new start-up
that has a lot of really innovative and wild ideas, combined with just
about zero experience in the rocket business.As I said, apparently you haven't been paying attention. You're the
one living in a fantasy world, one in which contractors actually
deliver on their promises, and meet program goals, schedules and
budgets. And that NASA officials get punished when they don't.

So what is the problem, NASA, the customers or both?