A "Senior Moment" At NASA

The May/June issue of Government Leader is all about the coming shortage of managers in the government bureaucracy as Boomers start to retire. I'm sure that Boomers will use this an another excuse to offshore jobs rather than train the next generation of managers or streamline our bloated bureaucracy. Gen X-ers are just slackers. Why bother training them. But I'm getting off track here.

There's an article entitled "Succession Game Planning", which quotes a passage in a book by David DeLong entitled Lost Knowledge: Confronting the Threat of an Aging Workforce. Here's the part I want you to read about:

In an era of cost-cutting and downsizing, the engineers who designed the huge Saturn 5 rocket ... were encouraged to take early retirement from the space program. With them went years of experience and expertise about the design trade-offs that had been made in building the Saturn rockets. Also lost were what appear to be the last set of critical blueprints for the Saturn booster, which was the only rocket ever built with enough thrust to launch a manned lunar payload.

According to DeLong, “the blueprints were actually lost in some giant document warehouse in Georgia. But the point is, no one knows where they are.” Should NASA return to the moon, the space agency will have to start from scratch.

It's just amazing that this level of incompetence could happen. The Boomers grew up dreaming of riding the Space Race to other worlds. They took the keys from the generation that actually got us to the Moon and, when it came time to hand those keys over to the next generation, they lost them.

I wish I could remember the name of the article I read several years ago about NASA's resistance to a bunch of new employees who dragged the agency into the PC Age with desktop computers! The old guard didn't want to give up their punch cards and tape reels.

When W announced the beginning of the drive to put men back on the Moon and then Mars, space advocacy groups rejoiced. I felt nothing after the speech. The deficit was already sky high after the War in Iraq, I couldn't see how Congress would approve it. But it wasn't just that, the speech sucked. It lacked excitement. It fell way short of Kennedy's 1961 speech which tasked this country to put a man on the Moon by the end of the 1960's. There was no passion. No fire in his eyes. No zeal. And the public's reaction mirrored the President's.

Sure enough, there's been no funding for this goal. NASA has been told to make do with the budget it has. Science programs are being drastically cut. It's become an unfunded mandate, an empty promise.

Space exploration isn't cheap. It takes the deep pockets of governments to adequately fund these ventures. Sadly, it comes with a thick layer of bureaucracy. While some can't see the scientific benefits of space exploration, they probably couldn't live without the common everyday spinoffs like: velcro, global weather coverage, bazillions of channels for their TV's, the network that enables cell phone coverage (there's more to it than just the towers), not to mention the spy satellites which help to maintain our military's technological superiority.

I think that private industry is the only thing that can possibly save the American space program in the long run. Congress has screwed with NASA for decades. It's why we lost two shuttles and never went back to the Moon. Congress doesn't have the desire and committment to see the American space program done right. They're just looking at the next election. Only people in private industry have the passion and committment to see that our voyage into space is done properly, cheaply, and safely.

Now if only we could get Congress to drop all the regulations regarding spaceflight and get the hell out of the way.

\_/
DED