"Maybe NASA ought to stick to probes and space telescopes, and leave the manned missions to the private sector."

Yeah! And keep paying my salary, yeah! And my husband's salary, yeah!

(For an unbiased perspective on NASA's future.)

For about thirty years now, NASA has been the most powerful argument against government activism anyone could point to. If Bush really is serious about manned space exploration, he and Administrator Griffin can find ways to encourage the infant commercial manned space sector--something NASA's been fighting since day one.

NASA is staffed almost entirely by people who want to go into space so much that they decided to make a career out of it. Everything that detracts from that goal is a result of politics and the public's insistence on their always doing everything exactly perfectly every single time, with no margin of error, on pain of losing fickle public support and the meager budget that goes with it.

In the first 24 years of manned space flight, NASA has killed 17 people in flight or on the launchpad. Of those, only the first three were bare-assed technical failures. We killed two shuttles and their crews precisely because non-technical people with their own agendas stuck their noses in and made the technical folks make compromises. Three O-rings were safer than one, but budget restraints prevented their inclusion. Environmentally friendly main tank insulation flaked off during liftoff, which the stuff it replaced did not. I wonder how the birth of aviation compares, if we're counting corpses?

Give NASA the money it needs to do its job, and leave them the hell alone. They'll take you to the universe.

I'm sure you've heard the joke: Better. Faster. Cheaper. Pick two.

I'm not saying commercial space flight is a bad idea. I'm all for it, personally. But NASA is not the monster keeping it from happening. Excessive regulation brought about by kicked-puppy syndrome is.

Pet peeve, sorry.

Ack! 44 years, not 24. 1961 to 2005. I hate typos.

The problem with commercial space exploration is that the US government and/or other nations are going to be reluctant to recognize sufficiently rigorous property rights of business entities to make it a profitable enterprise. In other words, protecting mining claims, allowing companies to have claims on solar orbital space for solar satellites, and so forth. Companies are going to need to be convinced that the looters won't grab their property rights the second it looks attractive to do so, or when the moonbats start yelping before they sink tens of billions of dollars into this sort of thing.

Strapping yourself to a million pound bomb, however carefully you try to meter its burn rate, is inherently very risky. The safety record requires six nines reliability on extremely complex machines. This is expensive.

So, no offense to the commentators above, and with all due respect to NASA's accomplisments, I'm not sure manned space flight provides the best research bang for the buck. And yes, I am aware of the many technical derivatives, such as integrated circuits, that came from these programs. However, in all honesty, microgravity crystal growth does hold the same promise.

In the mean time, for the folks who want a personal space fligh experience, something like the x-prize seems the perfect way to do it. Let the goverment help by providing the global communications infrastructure and lauch/landing fascilities, but let the risk fall to non-federal employees. Who, btw, will glady assume it. How many more people die each year mountain climbing?

The post-1970 manned space program is one of my own pet peeves, David, so I probably spoke more harshly about NASA than I should have. Conflicting directives from Congress and successive administrations can take a big share of the responsibility for a fairly rudderless performance. But a series of, IMHO, blunders--the destruction of the Saturn-5 design files and the awful, 400-billion-dollar "Battlestar Galactica" scheme put forth in response to Bush 41's Mars Intitiative, to name two--have convinced me that all is not well within the NASA bureaucracy. There are plenty of good, talented people there, with a real commitment to the agency's goals. But their efforts seem to be frustratingly unproductive, and *some* of the fault seems to lie with systemic problems at NASA itself.

I'm not saying commercial space flight is a bad idea. I'm all for it, personally. But NASA is not the monster keeping it from happening. Excessive regulation brought about by kicked-puppy syndrome is.

And I've got news for you Free Marketers in Space: the same's going to happen to commercial spaceflight as well.

The first time some commercial company's spacecraft burns up over some populated territory (even if it's only over a fishing boat in the Pacific), or someone wonders what's in the exhaust, or whether a spacecraft is carrying an (aiieeee!) RTG, there's going to be

a) the mother of all lawsuits, and (or resulting in)

b) massive regulatory legislation

which will price nearly everyone right out of the market.

Yeah! And keep paying my salary, yeah! And my husband's salary, yeah!

Come, now! Next you'll be saying (per this newer post) they shouldn't abolish tenure at U. Colorado.

Re: Angie's 10:44 post....

As a CPA, I can't help myself -- it all comes down to bankruptcy.

If a private enterprise allows people to put up money for a space design, and when the craft blows up over someone's sheep farm the company gets sued out of existence, and -- most importantly -- if the assets of this firm become available at 1/2 cent on the dollar in a bankruptcy trustee sale.....then we'll own the stars.

If, instead, the government regulates the life out of the idea, picks winners and losers, and regulates "fair returns" and "legitimate grievances", then the optimal course of action is to secure a government pension right here on earth.

So the question is where one would prefer humans to be in a couple of dozen years......

Angie wrote:
"Come, now! Next you'll be saying (per this newer post) they shouldn't abolish tenure at U. Colorado."

Actually, on that point I have no conflict of interest, as I'm a non-tenure-track research associate.

Regarding NASA funding, astronomers are about to find themselves in an ackward position. Funding from the NSF has been drying up, so everyone has been switching over to getting research and instrumentation $$ from NASA. After the loss of Columbia and the announcement of Bush's new Mars initiative, astronomers are discovering that none of the letters in "NASA" stand for "astronomy" or "science." It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. In that respect, I wish I did have tenure, so at least I could know I would still be in the field in the future. Instead, I have to wait and see how the field works out, like an employee in the "real world" or something. Damn.

Cthulhu, (Cthulhu: CPA -- that would make an interesting TV series) I believe that the government would not leave the commercial space industry at the mercy of the civil courts for long. Just imagine: people living under the flight path of some re-entering space vehicle, subject to the whims of a cold, cruel corporation with more money that God, able to buy hotshot lawyers and Elder God CPAs to do the Little People out of their just compensation. Can we let that stand? No, we cannot. We must legislate! It would be inevitable.