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|  | TODAY'S DISCUSSION | | | | | | | |
With the possible exception of the Postal Service,
NASA seems to garner top honors as everyone’s favorite, federal fall
guy.
Among space aficionados, the Agency is routinely
rebuked for being bloated and lacking in nerve. A series of high-profile
blunders, ranging from Hubble’s faulty mirror to the Challenger and Columbia
disasters, have convinced many that NASA is short on competence. At the
same time, a lot of non-technical folk regard the Agency as a sinkhole for money
that could be applied to social programs, but is instead being frivolously
expended on launching motorized skateboards to Mars. In a case of pop art
imitating pop perception, Dan Brown’s recent thriller, “Deception Point,”
portrays NASA as not only massively wasteful, but politically
malevolent.
Numerous people -- including its supporters -- feel
that the Agency has wandered off the yellow brick road, and has lost sight of
meaningful goals. I recently attended a space conference at Cape
Canaveral; a three-day event that finished up with an awards ceremony for school
kids. Presiding at the ceremony were a handful of Mercury and Apollo
astronauts, including Wally Schirra, Jim Lovell, and Al Worden. These guys
are not spring chickens anymore, although their minds are keen. On stage,
they poked one another, joking over past missions and who among them was the
oldest. I sat in the audience tingling with a faint sadness: these were
the now-frayed heroes of my youth. Giants going to seed before my
eyes. Where are today’s space heroes? Were the boots of these men so
impossibly large?
It’s NASA’s fault, many say. The Agency, wed to
the crushingly expensive Space Station and still reliant on the inefficient,
doubtful Shuttle, needs a shake-up. That’s been the decade-old mantra
intoned by hundreds of editorials in the space press. Shake-up.
Well, the agitation has begun. First there was
the Columbia Shuttle investigation, which pointed its finger at bureaucratic
stumbling as much as at falling foam. Then, in January, President Bush
sharply delineated a new objective for NASA: return to the moon, and send humans
on to Mars. Last week, the President’s Commission on Implementation of
U.S. Space Exploration Policy added its own fillip: streamline the organization
chart, focus on missions rather than projects, and involve the private sector in
a far larger share of the work. The obvious appeal of this last point was
underscored on June 21, when Scaled Composites, a privately funded aeronautics
firm, lofted a rocket plane to a height of 100 km, the near neighborhood of
space. They did this for a fraction of the cost of a NASA
launch.
The suggested changes are practical and, importantly,
politically palatable. They’re a well-reasoned response, framed in accord
with contemporary practice. Today, when an organization suffers a dramatic
setback, the most common reaction is to first indict, and then to
reorganize. (Neither seems to have been considered when Britain’s Royal
Geographic Society sent Robert Scott on his ill-fated expedition to the South
Pole in 1911. Times change.) The shake-up of NASA will undoubtedly
prove beneficial in the long run.
But while I’m convinced that an organizational
shuffle might do the Agency some good, I also recognize that Americans are
notoriously tough on their government. NASA (and we’re talking about the
space and astronomy work here: few citizens seem to be aware of the Agency’s
efforts on behalf of aviation) may be easy to criticize, but its accomplishments
surpass any other space program you care to name. Of course it beat the
Soviets to the moon, but even in contemporary times, NASA has booked success
when others were racking up failure.
The Soviets put some landers on Venus, but their
probes only managed to take a few photos before expiring of heat
exhaustion. NASA hardware, on the other hand, orbited that world for
years, and mapped nearly the entire surface with radar. The Red Planet --
everyone’s favorite solar system target -- is an elephant graveyard for
spacecraft. The Soviets tried 16 times to reach Mars. Their probes
succeeded twice (and one of those “successes” only operated for 20
seconds). NASA’s score is 12 wins in 18 tries. Only NASA has sent
spacecraft to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and a handful of
asteroids. Those are uncontested triumphs.
NASA also put together the most ambitious SETI
experiment of its time. It was ended early in its observing phase, not
because of Agency failings or lack of interest, but because of Congressional
action.
True, the space program has killed 17 U.S.
astronauts. But is there anyone who would deny that exploration is
dangerous? In the 18th and 19th centuries, European explorers who sailed
into the unknown waters of northern Canada frequently disappeared --
forever. NASA’s safety record is incomparably better, and nobody would
argue that Canada is a more treacherous place than space. Just last year,
21 Brazilian workers were killed in a missile explosion. In 1960, the
Soviets wiped out more than 100 people who were attempting to launch a military
rocket. That disaster alone should put the Agency’s failings in
perspective.
NASA’s current budget is $15 billion. That may
sound like a lot, but there are people whose personal worth is greater.
The expected outlays for the federal Department of Health and Human Services
this year will be $543 billion. The Senate just passed a 2005 funding bill
for the Pentagon that totals $416 billion. NASA’s neither expensive, nor a
significant tap on social programs.
Our space agency may have gotten a “needs to improve”
on its latest report card. But I’m reluctant to pile on with the
critics. There’s a NASA T-shirt in my closet, and frankly, I still wear it
with pride.
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