I don't know anything about the internal NASA management bureaucracy, but I do know about bureaucracy in business and government agencies. It is by no means guaranteed that Mr. Cook is responsible for the failures of the projects that he managed. He might well be, but it certainly does not automatically follow. Bureaucracies excel at separating authority from responsibility (in fact, it can be argued that this is a core purpose of a bureaucracy, although personally I would disagree with that goal). Mr. Cook might well have known, for example, how to salvage on or more of those projects. Many of the failures to complete R&D on next-generation launch technologies were due to the budget over-run problems of the Space Shuttle program, which left the other programs continually starved for and competing for limited funding pools which were stretched too thin. NASA didn't have the budget flexibility to sustain an R&D program like
X-33 through to completion.
The relatively well documented
failure of the X-33 VentureStar project, for example, is known to be in part due to a project requirement (a cryogenic carbon fiber composite H2 tank) that the Lockheed Martin engineers identified as a risk (due to immature materials technology). Yes, it was NASA who insisted on taking the risk without proper scheduling and funding for risk reduction, and that is a failure of project management.
However, the internal NASA politics that led to this may be pretty complicated, and I haven't seen any discussion of that. Mr. Cook might well have fought on behalf of the engineers, but lost. It's also possible to look at the X-33 program and decide that it was on the verge of success. The project was under-funded, but the problems appeared to be reasonably clear engineering and materials science problems, which also appeared to have pretty clear solutions paths available (for a fee). The ramp for the aerospike engine was too heavy, and the carbon fiber tank technology was immature. Both of those are materials technology problems where the solutions could be had. In fact, it appears that the tank problem was solvable with current tech (aluminum-lithium alloy, like the modern version of the Space Shuttle external tank) and improved carbon fiber technology, which was apparently demonstrated after the cancellation of the X-33 program. The aerospike ramp weight also could be solved. Meanwhile, the heat shield technology developed was apparently impressive, and the aerospike engine work was also viewed in retrospect as pretty successful.
Another thing I've observed is that government agencies, at least under the Bush administration, were literally obsessed with talking about "lessons learned" from failed projects. Unfortunately, they tended to learn the wrong lessons, often because the real lessons were not politically or organizationally acceptable. Here's an article on the X-33 as an example:
Lesson in Failed X-33 Bid, New Engine Promising. The real lessons: doing something useful (reducing the cost of payload to LEO) is hard work, the X-33 was close to achieving the difficult objectives the project was assigned, and yes, it would have been well worth an extra $1 Billion to complete the project and demonstrate the suite of useful technologies developed. Instead, NASA senior management internalized a false "lesson" because they don't need to admit management failure when they simply throw up their hands and blame the concept of a reusable LEO launcher.
