Comment NASA is due for a shakeout (Score 1) 920
The US Manned Space Program has been in sad shape for decades. The reusable shuttle that costs 3x as much per pound of payload as an expendable. (Why? The salaries of the staff needed to prepare it for each trip dominate the costs.) The ISS is the most expensive thing every constructed by man (by far), yet it produces little or no real science. (Why? Design tradeoffs again. Vibrates too much, too noisy, etc.) Given these programs have failed so badly, why weren't they cancelled ten or twenty years ago? Because of all the jobs they provide in countless congressional districts around the country.
We have thus arrived at a situation where most of NASA's money is spent on manned programs that just don't work, with just a pittance allocated to unmanned programs that do virtually all of the real science. That's a shame, because there are things people (and only people) can do. For example, a manned base on Phobos operating unmanned probes on the surface would be vastly cheaper than a manned mission to the surface of Mars, but vastly more productive than trying to operate probes from Earth. (With due respect to the fantastic accomplishments of the two Mars Rovers.) Scientists don't have to go to the sea floor to study it, but they do have to get their feet wet.
So I'm all for killing the current manned program, perhaps entirely, provided some planning is made to replace it with something sensible. I've long feared that if Congress cut the manned program, rather than give more money to unmanned missions, they'd probably cut those too. I'm still waiting to hear what the sensible replacement would be. The Augustine report was a step in the right direction, but I think it tried too hard to work inside the existing framework.
--Greg (the best thing about hitting yourself in the head with a hammer is that it feels so good when you stop)
