The science ranking came from some multinational test that came under discussion at a science workshop I attended recently. While I don’t know the details, and one could certainly argue the exact number, there’s no doubt that we’re way behind the top 10. But these things come and go in cycles. I imagine that sometime during the next decade, there will be another shock like Sputnik, and we’ll get our act back together again.

The nation with the highest per capita car ownership is… Luxemborg? Huh? What do they need all those cars for? And were do they keep them?

The solids were used for 2 reasons in 1972. 1) The liquid strapons would require the shuttle development budget to spend $1.05 Billion dollars in its peak funding year. The solid strapons promised (and later did not deliver) a peak of shuttle funding of $.946 billion. Since a limit of $1.0 billion had been set, the OMB took the easy recommendation . 2) President Nixon owed a very large political debt to Senator Jake Garn, of Utah, where the plant to make the solid oxidizer already was, and where a plant was built to make the segments of the SRBs.

Kona also said: “I DON’T agree the agency is broken beyond repair and should get out of the way for private concerns.”

No speaker at the recent Space Access Conference called for the dissolution of NASA. Indeed, Jeff Greason pointed out that MSFC, KSFC, and JSC could not be built today, because the EPA would never give them permits for construction. So, if they die, we cannot replace them, and we *might* need the larger boosters they can build and launch someday. Nevertheless, it was generally agreed, that if NASA behaviors did not change, it *would* die because the Congress’s distrust ofNASA would rise to high for funding to pass.

Certainly the individual engineers and staff of NASA deserve great praise for getting anything at all done in such an environment. Indeed I know of few space activists who denigrate the line people at NASA. What *is* heavily criticized is two levels of NASA action.

One is continually tweaking its policy to get a NASA-only Human Spaceflight Operations environment in the US. An example being that Mike Griffin threw out a perfectly good plan, and substituted one that had a publicly funded NASA booster “competing” openly with privately funded suppliers of crewed orbital launch, two of whom already had excellent boosters flying. This made it far harder to raise money for anyone else not already flying with an Angel investor. It was meant to do just that. That way, NASA’s COTS program was the only way the private companies could hope to get to orbit with crewed spacecraft. Thus, they would be more and more under NASA’s thumb, through the COTS that was mandated by the Aldridge Commission, and could not be ignored in 2005. This is the sort of policy dance that NASA did when they decided that *all* US satellites would be launched on the Shuttle in the 1980s.

The other past behavior of NASA managers that gets them no slack from New Space advocates is 25 years of specific attempts to scuttle private launch companies that were not already NASA contractors. In 1996, I was privileged to sit for 90 minutes in an alcove at the Space ‘96 Conference, and listen to Max Hunter’s wisdom about spaceflight and rocket development. Max was the man who took the Thor IRBM from concept drawings to successful test in 15 months. His knowledge was deep and broad.

However, he spent 45 minutes of that telling me about attempts by Mr Mueller to recruit him in 1979 for their scheme to sink” Space Services Inc.” the first non-NASA contractor company to get a rocket to the pad since the late 1940s. He was told “Max, we’ve just *got* to stop these people! The mistakes they will make during their learning curve will destroy the reputation of anyone launching rockets, including NASA.” After SSI blew up their first example of their first rocket on the pad, as NASA had often done, Mr. Mueller wiggled his way into SSI, and got them to use old Minuteman stages, that were in limited supply anyway, and far to costly to produce to compete with NASA’s Space Shuttle prices.

Not surprisingly, SSI ran out of money before anything got to orbit. This history was repeated more indirectly with Pan American Spaceways and other private and public efforts (SEI, and DC-X/Delta Clipper) up to 2004.

Its harder to do that sort of thing when Elon Musk has all the money he needs, and Discovery killed seven more astronauts. There are remnants of that attitude yet, and they come out in policy shaving like Griffin’s, when he set up his co-opting in COTS, through “competition” with an Ares 1 program that had 20-50 times the development funding that private teams would spend. If it once again becomes specific and blatant as before, then we can once again expect to hear Jim Davidson’s old cry from many more mouth’s, …”NASA, Delenda Est!”

It’s really up to NASA managers behavior.

*SPEECHLESS*

When you describe your harrowing adventures in the sky, I am forced to think about the pioneers of the sport, flinging themselves into open space without the decades of experience and development that we enjoy (?) today. Imagine the courage it took to try it! I proved my manhood in race cars in my teens; I seek no more thrills now, but I do understand the draw. I continue to hope you arrive safely after every airborne adventure.