NASA is on the cusp of its most serous identity crisis. Moon missions canceled. Mars missions canceled. More than half the staff laid off by end of 2011. The space station and its shuttles have over-proven that low-orbit living is doable. Serious reinvention is called for.
Here’s the thing: it’s not just budgetary, though it does cost $1.7B to build a shuttle and $450mm to launch one. The problem, and the key to reinvention, is that peopled space exploration isn’t where the intellectual action is. Knowledge is about tech, not the explorer’s urge. Orbiting telescopes are more romantic and revealing than orbiting atmosphere pods. The Hadron Collider is intended to solve not only questions of space, but time and ultimate creation. Robots on other planets do a much better job exploring than humans.
NASA is already in some of these businesses. The Hubble telescope and Mars Rover are both NASA projects. Shouldn’t the agency’s future be all about the most productive avenues of knowledge exploration, rather than shooting people into a slim envelope of extra-planetary space?
Rebrand. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is tangled up in aeronautics, which is the science of airborne (or vacuum-borne) navigation. As long as that legacy of human flight defines the agency’s work, its core mission will conflict with scientific and budgetary realities.
NASA is turning a corner in this direction. The 2011 budget approved by Congress is $19B skewed toward science and unpeopled exploration. Maybe it’s time to more thoroughly dismantle NASA, whose budget peaked in the 1960s, and rebrand as a pure science institution. USSS (United States Space Sciences)? That acronym is already in use by the United States Secret Service. Which agency would be the more glamorous … ?
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bradhill posted this
