On NASA archeology

Bert Rutan, the driving force behind the privately financed Space Ship One, has harsh words for NASA:

“They are forcing the program to be done with technology that we already know works. They are not creating an environment where it is possible to have a breakthrough,” Rutan advised. “It doesn’t make sense,” he said, contending that programs must encourage risks “in order to stumble into breakthroughs.”

Rutan is right, and he should know. He's highly driven to get a private space fleet underway with the help of billionaire Sir Richard Branson, who wants to take passengers into sub-orbital flights on Virgin Galactic spaceways.

Rutan says he wants to go to the moon "in my lifetime." If the NASA plan to return to the Moon and Mars goes forward anywhere even close to the plan, Rutan won't be going. Government interference with private companies attempting space exploration threatens to halt the entire process.

A half-century after the nation first began a space program, the outlook is not promising, and there is little to get the American public excited again. It could be argued that more people oppose space exploration than support it today, some for good reasons. (And others who are just know-nothing naysayers.) Several high profile failures have brought NASA to the point where it seems incapable of daring innovations and, worse, making intelligent safety decisions on what it already has.

It is painfully obvious that NASA is a victim of bureaucratization and loss of nerve. NASA is actually "reverting" to old technology. Rutan calls it "archeology." But the problem may not totally be with budgets and vision: there is a concern that today's NASA personnel do not have the cojones to do space well.

NASA’s space shuttle is complex and generically dangerous, Rutan pointed out. Still, not flying the shuttle to the Hubble Space Telescope is symbolic of a larger issue.

“The budget forecast [for NASA] is to go out and spend hundreds of billions of dollar to go to Mars and yet you don’t have the courage to go back to the Hubble … it looks like you got the wrong guys doing it,” Rutan concluded.

Which is why the U.S., always claiming to be the champion of private enterprise, ought to become the cheerleader for private groups to take us to the next level. Left up to NASA, it may never happen.