by tanstaafl76 » Fri Nov 06, 2009 5:14 pm
I never suggested it was. If someone wants to go through the financial gymnastics of determining precisely how much has been spent by NASA specifically on the parachute system that failed, I have a feeling it wouldn't be any less disappointing.
Nevertheless, the parachute failure alone is not the point, but rather the seemingly low bar set for this test mission by an organization that should be the absolute pinnacle of human spaceflight capability on planet earth given its history. Dare I say it has a touch of a token feel to it, or that someone took Scotty the engineer's advice to under-promise and over-deliver so as to appear a miracle worker. They've certainly gotten the under-promise part down. And then as long as the thing doesn't explode on the launch pad it will be hailed as an unbridled success regardless of the relatively insubstantial outcome and side issues.
Perhaps I'm just grumpy about this flight but the whole thing smells a little bit. It smells like the program was designed in a more budget-friendly environment, designed to be stretched out with token milestone test flights that really could have been consolidated into far fewer ones, but efficiency of time and money are a far lower priority than showing things off to the public to make sure everyone knows "NASA is doing something, look!" and to ensure a nice long production roadmap for NASA employees and contractors. That way everyone is happy, right? The stupid public will never catch on anyway, as long as we fire off a rocket from time to time they'll "ooo" and "ahhh" and thump their chests and salute the flag, and the handful of astronauts that have the real cajones to get into our "fire and forget" candle-rocket will deservedly play the part of national heroes, a reputation that with any luck will rub off onto the whole bureaucracy.
And while I don't doubt everyone at NASA wants to go back to the moon and beyond, at times it feels like an equally important goal is to make sure they get a 25 year NASA career and nice retirement package out of it to boot. There sure doesn't seem to be a zeal to get the taxpayer the most bang for their NASA-funding dollar. After all, if they rushed through it with zeal and wrapped up the project in 10 years, then they'd have to start over and begin a new one, which might mean some personnel shake-up and new project designs, and perhaps more foreboding than anything, heightened expectation of NASA. In the space race it was impressive to see what the organization could achieve with not only ample funding but an incentive to do it promptly... but sadly that urgency seems to have evaporated.
I don't entirely blame them, after all it goes against the survival instincts of every major government agency, which typically put priority on spending every penny of their budget every year to make sure it doesn't get cut the next time around instead of looking to save taxpayers money, and making sure certain phrases such as "under budget" and "ahead of schedule" never enter the vocabulary.
"Under budget" could prompt politicians to reconsider the next round of funding as possibly being more than sufficient, and "ahead of schedule" means you're spoiling the party for all the NASA employees who wouldn't have anything left to do. Therefore why would such an organization be motivated to have a culture of anything but "slow and expensive, that's just how spaceflight is" ?? Isn't the relative and sudden efficiency of the shuttle program now that they have more concrete deadlines to hit a bit suggestive? Shouldn't one entertain the possibility that NASA may have been dragging its feet between shuttle flights for years because there was no incentive to perform them any faster?
When the Constellation roadmap was put together, they never envisioned the current environment, that the entire program would risk being abandoned or substantially modified based upon some outside commission who are frighteningly aware of every bureaucratic dirty secret and skeleton in NASA's closet. Yet not only has that become a vivid reality, but the very existence of NASA itself has started to be questioned given the severity of our budget issues. This was definitely not in the cards a few years back! Now that the apple cart is starting to upturn in the budget situation, substantial doubt has been cast on the practical necessity of Ares I, and their Ares I-X flight didn't wind up being quite as spectacularly flawless and attention-grabbing as they'd hoped, suddenly there is talk that they may be able to skip the Ares I-Y flight. Really? Just like that? All that careful budgetary planning and roadmapping and suddenly they can just decide they don't really need that test flight after all? Maybe some NASA folks are starting to realize that the elongated timelines and orbital transit gap is starting to make NASA look a bit like a fat man being asked to run a foot race, especially with lean private sector upstarts dashing to get human-rated spacecraft in orbit before Ares I ever sees a launch pad.
But hey, these are just my personal perceptions from the outside looking in. Honestly I hope I'm wrong. I hope NASA hasn't succumbed to such bureaucratic debilitation. I don't think it's unreasonable to voice these views though, considering my tax dollars are going to fund this as much as anyone else's are.
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