Management, mandate, and manned spaceflight

Maybe because people smell blood in the forthcoming CAIB report, it has
been fashionable lately to bash NASA management for the Columbia disaster.
This seems to be the exceedingly rare point on which Oberg, the New York
Times, CAIB, and many other parties all seem to agree. But not me.

(Curiously, relatively little anger is directed at NASA director Sean
O'Keefe, even though he calls himself a "bean counter". Does "bean
counter" sound like "flight safety"?)

I'm no fan of the NASA manned spaceflight program or its management, but
people are turning one single wart in the ugly picture into a mountain
of blame. People are talking as if Linda Ham personally hurled foam
at Columbia's wing in a fit of total incompetence. (But they grant
her "good intentions".) That's not what those meetings were about.
They were about MAYBE discovering the hole in the RCC panel and MAYBE
saving the astronauts, and even so probably not Columbia itself.
It would have been an expensive long shot and it's not the real problem.

The real problem is that the shuttle is not safe for astronauts and
never will be. Granted, bad management is the immediate cause of that.
But behind bad management lies a bad mandate, namely, the mandate
of manned spaceflight. A manager with a good mandate may be good or
bad; a manager with a bad mandate is going to look bad no matter what.
It is a fantasy of public opinion that space travel is kind-of like air
travel and kind-of like continental exploration. (For most people it's
not even strongly held opinion, just ill-informed.) It's actually more
like ocean-floor exploration, which by common sense is almost entirely
done by remote control. But NASA and its elected patrons have spent
decades catering to public naivete about manned spaceflight. Now they
face a reckoning.
--
/\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis)
/ \
\ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/
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