Rocket Scientist

I’ve gone into concerns I have about NASA, particularly the manned space programs.  Notably, that many of them aren’t so much problems NASA has created as much as burdens they bear, challenges that make it harder to do what they dearly want to do: explore space.  But there is one more thing I worry about.

Let me remind you that these are my personal opinions and not those of NASA or those of my company.

Yes, one more thing I’m afraid NASA lacks: vision.  When the space program in the US began, people dreamed and knew what they wanted to accomplish, were breaking new ground to make it happen.

Now, the path to everything reachable in the next decade has already been trod.  The Shuttle/Orbiter is an astounding machine, but it has a very limited range: low earth orbit.  And, the same features that it was designed to meet, like reusability, are working against it.  Reentry is incredibly hard on equipment and the outside of the Orbiter, as we learned with Columbia, is delicate.  When you have a single and precious resource, something as capable but also as complicated, as the Shuttle, you move from constantly improving and updating as you learn lessons to patching and finding rationales to work around problems that arise, because design changes are expensive, complex and correcting them can be more trouble than the original problem.

We’ve been using the same hardware for nearly thirty years - which means we don’t have the rocket genius that took us from Mercury to Apollo in about a decade.  Everything we do now is a variation on what’s been done before and the brain power we need, no, the vision that takes us forward, well, I haven’t seen it.  I don’t have it either.  And it’s hard to get excited up over doing something that, well, has already been done, and spectacularly.

This is very important.  Fuzzy goals lead to fuzzy requirements.  Fuzzy requirements mean everyone isn’t working to the same plan, which will be a nightmare with a complex program where so many elements have to work together.  Fuzzy requirements make it harder for even the most dedicated contractor to provide what’s needed.  That means iterations, design changes, and adjustments (which have to move sideways as well as up and down or, again, hardware won’t work together) are far more complicated and hard to put into the system, even in the early design phases.

But, also, without the kind of vision von Braun and the other early NASA dreamers had, without that genius and ability to lay new paths and build new dreams, the program is missing the cohesive glue that ensures many diverse systems are brought together in a meaningful way.

People who are inspired can do great things and it takes a dreamer with a technical mind to create that kind of inspiration.  There are a lot of good people working on this, but, without inspiration, without the unified dream pulling it all together, making something new and exciting happen is just so much harder.

Update: Foxnews picked up on this and has an article on similar lines: here

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