On Sep 19, 9:47*pm, Robert Collins wrote:
On Wed, Sep 16, 2009 at 09:36:26PM -0400, Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:

"OM" wrote in message
.. .

...NASA needs only three *breakthroughs*:

1) A blank check that Congress can never touch unless it's to give
NASA more money.

Oh bull. *Sorry, but there's better things I want my tax dollars spent on
than a blank check for NASA. *I'm a huge fan of space, I'd love to see more
done, but a blank check, hardly.

NASA needs a blank check like America needs bigger government. *Apart
from the obvious problem of the military being in such close
proximity, NASA lacks the diversity of the capitalist free market
system. *For that reason alone there is surely no sense in throwing
trillions of dollars at the existing bureaucracy.

Look how the capitalist free market system influences the military.
DOD lobbyists/contractors allowed to run amok, gets their officials
elected in order to start wars (i.e. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice,
etc.) They also empower their cousins in Big Oil as well. That said,
I do not agree with the blank check idea for NASA, but I also don't
believe in the myth of a laissez-faire capitalist utopia either.


2) An official mandate to expand Space Exploration and the
Exploitation of Space combined with working closely with private
industry to produce their own advanced technologies.

* * This one I can probably buy into.

This, at least is reasonable. *It might be better if it were worded
differently: *An official mandate to marshall space exploration
efforts in concert with private industry. *The trickle-down theory of
government spending at work.

Commercial spaceflight is needed but it isn't going to happen until
there is profit it in it.


3) An officially mandated return to the management style that allowed
Mercury, Gemini and Apollo to succeed, which will include the
elimination of all the middle-management self-preservation elements of
red tape. Anyone caught trying to play bureacracy bull**** games that
interfere with progress is sent to jail.

This is sort of ironic because despite the idea that NASA had minimal
bureaucracy, it built up a huge one simply to accomplish the Moon landings.
It wasn't a bunch of guys going around just building stuff. *When you can
track a part from when it was built, who built it, where it was placed in
storage, what testing it went under, you have to have a bureaucracy.

When you are managing dozens of projects, you need a bureaucracy.

Yeah, well we have computers now to manage all that stuff so there's
really going to be no need to hire all of the worlds middle-managers
to get meaningful space operations off the ground. *Hence, no need for
an unlimited budget.

I think when you look at the record of large projects at the scale of
the Apollo program, the control of excess spending is something
government doesn't do very well, even with all the meticulous record-
keeping.


Do you want to start with the DOD budget?


...Those are the kind of breakthroughs NASA needs to get us into
serious space exploration above and beyond what we're doing now.

Sorry OM, to me, this is mostly just fanboy talk.

These discussions are never meant to be representative of actual
scientific undertakings. *Presumably at least some of us are here are
interested in sharing ideas and discussing their merits.


Agreed