NEWS - Bush May Announce Return To Moon At Kitty Hawk - Space Daily

Rand Simberg wrote:
Herb Schaltegger glowed:
Forgive me if I sound cynical but how ****ing stupid is that quote? ".
. . forcing NASA to get serious . . ." PLEASE!

In addition, just what "considerable human spaceflight assets" does
NASA have that are helpful for going to the moon? And the agency
doesn't have "decades of experience." Organizations don't have
experience--people do, and many of the veterans are dead or retired.

While technically true, it does miss a couple of points.

First, the veterans who died and/or have retired had to figure it
out the hard way the first time, and got it right, and left us
scads of documentation on both right and wrong things.
What we have lost in detail is really two things...
One, the institutional hands on knowledge of exactly how
to make the specific hardware that went (which is by now
irrellevant; we wouldn't want to go back to the Moon
by recreating a S-V and CSM/LM from the microfilm anyways).
Two, the successful rapid project project management
experience. Which still exists in corners, though not in
the manned spaceflight organization in NASA.

Second, 'forcing NASA' to get serious does have some validity.
Let us compare... oh, heck. NASA and the Department of Defense.

It is not widely recognized in the Space community,
because it hasn't really been used within NASA,
but fear is in fact a useful motivator for defeating
bureacracies on a temporary basis to get things done.

DOD regularly decides it's going to make some things run differently
and puts people on the spot to fix things. People's careers
get wrecked for failing to perform, aggressive schedules and
R&D goals get set and adhered to, etc. This is not the usual
behaviour over there, but it's done from time to time.
You can see people being tossed out windows on fire from
time to time if you pay attention to the pentagon press.
And programs.

O'Keefe came out of the DOD. He has been involved
in getting some projects incinerated and getting
some people ignited then defenestrated. Rumsfeld has
been reportedly involved in this policy stuff, and he's
got quite a bit more experience applying fear as a
motivator as well.

One hypothetical approach here would be to start a major
set of initiatives now, and set specific long term goals,
and then assuming Bush (43) gets re-elected, for there to
be a major bloodbath among the non-perfomers about oh say
6 months into his second term. Something like that...


-george william herbert