Scuttle the Shuttle! Foundation Urges

Space Frontier Foundation Press Release via SpaceRef ^ | Monday, July 14, 2003 | Rick Tumlinson

[Fabozz]

"[D]on't you think NASA was pretty good in the early days? I wonder what's changed, they seemed inspired and excited back then. Perhaps it is as you say, the perceived competition (against the Russians) is gone."

My grandfather was one of the NACA engineers who became the founders of NASA. Those engineers had all just spent the duration of World War II developing warplanes. (Admittedly, some of those engineers designed planes for the Luftwaffe, but the principle is the same.) During wartime, getting results quickly, and getting them right the first time, meant the difference between life and death, victory and defeat. They ran NASA the same way they had run their wartime projects: lean, quick, free of bureaucracy and committed to doing whatever it took to hit the target.

Competition from the Soviets was a factor, but it was their wartime experience that taught them how to compete. By the end of Apollo, though, that spirit was gone. The war-hardened engineers were too old to keep running projects with that same intensity; they either became upper managers or moved to other opportunities. The ones who followed them learned their skills not in the airplane factories of a nation at war but in the postgraduate classrooms of universities rocked by 60s radicalism.

If you want to find engineers with that early-NASA spirit today, you can't look anywhere in the aerospace industry. You have to look at growth industries like computers, software and biotechnology, where the high-stakes, cutting-edge atmosphere of start-ups and IPOs inculcates that same "victory or death" ethic. In other words, the best way to duplicate NASA's early success is to kill NASA and offer its budget as prizes to private-sector firms.

[Sam Cree]

Thanks, that's very interesting and believable. It explains alot.

[anymouse]

I completely concur. Check my profile page for links to some space forums of interest.

[bvw]

There are fields were performance remains high, over generations. Every one I'm thinking of has the professional delivering directly to the person who uses or benefits from what is deleivered For example: surgeons, fire men, tailors, carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, theater.

[Iris7]

One can find good men in these fields, and also in the large bureaucratic organizations. I am involved in the latter sort of operation, and find the good men in it in a never ending struggle, making a great personal effort, sacrificing, to keep the organization running at all. This is probably how things work everywhere and everywhen (at least from my point of view).

[this_ol_patriot]

Do this right and we have the next economic boom.

[barkeep]

Just to be accurate, no one can say with absolute certainty what the threshhold level of healthy gee force would be, naturally there has been no way to empirically test it,but the best speculations I have read by people in the field is that half gee would be more than sufficient.