50 Years of Empty Mars Promises From NASA
Keith’s note: This 2006 video “Reach” by Karen Lau is my number one favorite thing NASA has ever done for education and public outreach. I try and feature it once a year. The actor in the video is probably 12 years old now. Yet we’re no closer to going back to the Moon – or on to Mars on the cusp of 2016 than we were in 2006.
I grew up in the 1960s being told that we’d land on the Moon “by the end of this decade”. We did. Then I was told by NASA that we’d be on Mars by 1981. Sure, why not. Now in 2015, nearly 50 years after my younger self was promised Mars by 1981 Charlie Bolden gets excited when he says “we’re less than 20 years away from going to Mars”.
Had NASA kept its original promise I’d have been 26 when we landed humans on Mars. Now, if NASA does it by 2035 I’ll be 80. If.
This is not progress, NASA. Its an embarrassment. And its your fault.
If memory serves, a science fiction writer once said he’d always known he would be alive to see the first man walk on the Moon, but that he’d never dreamed he might live to see the last.
Keith said, “Had NASA kept its original promise I’d have been 26 when we landed humans on Mars. Now, if NASA does it by 2035 I’ll be 80.
This is not progress, NASA. Its an embarrassment. And its your fault.”
That is the most wrongheaded statement that I have ever heard. You are smarter than this Keith and you know what you said here is wrong. However, your “NASA can’t do anything right ever” bias has overcome your good sense.
How can you assign all the blame of not reaching Mars on NASA? You do realize they are a government agency funded by Congress and headed by the President? They can’t just say, “Oh we will do this and this and get to Mars.” They have to abide by what Congress and the President gives them.
During the moon shot they had unprecedented support from both Congress and the President. After the goal was achieved Nixon slashed anything that went BEO and we were left with the shuttle.
I’ll agree with you that the monstrosity that was SEI was the NASA administration’s fault. However, there probably wouldn’t have been enough support in Congress then to get something like Mars Direct off the ground given their near cancellation of ISS in ’93.
The only reason we have a BEO program right now is because of the retirement of STS (which if Columbia hadn’t happened would still be flying) which forced the politicians (and yes some in NASA) to move to something different.
This is no way all NASA’s fault. They can’t go to Mars without support. It is like yelling at your grandma cause she can’t walk across the room without her walker.
If you are looking for someone to blame look no further than yourself, me, and others for not standing up enough and building support for human Mars exploration from the American people, Congress, and the President.
Well, “Joe” please explain how 50 years of NASA promises to send humans to Mars are constantly wrong? Oh, that’s right – it is the fault of Congress and the White House. NASA is guiltless in this regard. Gee, where does Congress and the White House get their budget numbers with which to make their decisions? Which agency constantly breaks their own budget estimates?
“where does Congress and the White House get their budget numbers with which to make their decisions? Which agency constantly breaks their own budget estimates?”
Were NASA’s Apollo budget estimates accurate back in the early 60’s?
This is a good question. In 1961, NASA, at the technical level, said a manned moon landing would cost $ 6 to 8 billion. At the time,Mercury was costing under $1 billion. The $6-8B was sent to the NASA Administrator, who felt this might be too low. He did not know what was a good estimate, but he doubled the amount to $12 billion and forwarded the estimate to the Vice President. Mr. Johnson got the $12 billion estimate, and thought the number might be too low. He decided to double it to $24 billion. This was the number sent to Mr. Kennedy and to Congress.
How much did the Apollo moon program cost? About $24 billion.
BTW, another lesson from Apollo. A lot of people think that Kennedy came up with the idea of a man on the moon on his own. Not true. Apollo, first as a circumlunar flight followed by a moon landing, was initiated by NASA in 1959 as a follow on to Mercury. The Saturn rocket program and the E-1 rocket motor (from which the F-1 emerged) were both started by President Eisenhower. When the new President wanted to know what to do to respond to the Soviets, the information was in hand. At the time, NASA thought they would be ready to land on the moon by 1967. Johnson and Kennedy felt this might be a bit too optimistic, so they said the end of the decade, which they even waffled on a bit, since no one was quite sure whether this meant 1969 or 1970.
I never said NASA was blameless. I said it wasn’t all their fault like you were saying.
Well the reason NASA couldn’t go to Mars was because the President and Congress told them not to. The moon shot happened because TPTB wanted to show that we could beat the Russians. After that many of them wanted to shut the whole thing down, NASA was lucky to get Shuttle and Skylab.
Even with budget overruns NASA still got Hubble and ISS off the ground and will soon get JWST into space. I believe Curiosity overran its budget too but it made it to Mars.
We are not going to get to Mars on a shoestring budget and NASA can’t do much about that. The current administration and OSTP has decided the current strategy. Do you really think NASA could go to them with a realistic estimate and they would say, “Okay, lets do this!” Blame them if you are unsatisfied.
During Apollo the majority of the NASA budget was spent on getting us to the moon. Now about a 1/5th of the budget is spent on humans to BEO with about 1/2 total spent on HSF.
I will also be 80. I am absolutely tired of all the Mars hooplah and with NO RESULTS. ARRM/ARM is NOT on the way to Mars. A space station in Cislunar space only makes sense if we are going back to the moon (and not for footprints and flag missions) with colonization in mind. Building a self sustaining Lunar colony would provide a lot of experience in all sorts of areas that is particularly germaine to Mars.
In truth, I doubt that I will see another human being touch the Moon or Mars before I die.
To head to Mars, a LEO ZBO depot is the number one priority–HLV/Orion not required. It is so sad 🙁
The re-usable deep space habitat, the L2 Based Gateway ‘Voyager’ is not stuck in one location, is key piece of hardware for crew missions.
In-space propulsion, economic access to space, crew health, space power–the other space grand challenges. Reusable EP and chemical tugs that travel to and from an asteroid from L2, which will eventually cycle between L2 and Mars. To pay for all this shift resources away from SLS/Orion and consolidate LVs. Spiraling EP tugs from LEO is a complete joke.
Decades ago, an asteriod mission where the LV and habitat could actually reach the asteroid was considered a stepping stone to mars to check out the hardware prior. A lunar colony has the wrong gravity, wrong radiation environment, etc, it does not develop methods to travel and survive the long duration trip nor reduce the costs with the horrendous current agenda.
“If you are looking for someone to blame look no further than yourself, me, and others for not standing up enough and building support for human Mars exploration from the American people, Congress, and the President.”
Keith has already made it clear that the Space Advocates (I say to Keith that he is one too) are doing it wrong, without much advice on how to do it better. “Space Advocates can’t do anything right ever” is also a common theme here.
“They have to abide by what Congress..” rather the owners of Congress, who are provided tainted studies by NASA, while most of NASA presents numerous alternatives rather redeveloping Billions more expensive expendable hardware.
Do not provide funding to debunk the fake issues to garner votes and support the base is the mantra, decades of failed policies.
After Apollo, NASA returned to R&D based on reuse to lower costs to space, they were not ‘left with Shuttle’, but starting. 4 decades later there is absolutely no reason to retain shuttle derived. Take a look in the mirror as you are also part of the problem-supporting a terrible architecture and totally unnecessary product lines. No one could possibly advocate for it…oops…
I guess you and I are about the same age. I’ll be 80 too by then. And I too was expecting to see a Mars mission long before then, perhaps not in 1981 (even then I thought that might have been a little too optimistic), but certainly before retiring from NASA, where I was already planning to work. I recently retired, and a first human mission to Mars is still 20 years away…at least!
That’s not fair to NASA. They did pretty good just in keeping Apollo going with support from Congress and the President in spite of tepid popular support in the 1960s. It was really unlikely they’d be able to go beyond that to get support for a much more expensive and complex Mars mission by the early 1980s. The political support just wasn’t there, especially since we had a President (Nixon) who probably only kept the crewed space program alive because he didn’t want to be the one to cancel it after Apollo – but he also wasn’t going to stick his neck out for anything more than Shuttle.
I do think it might have been possible to start sooner with a supportive President and a good, cost-effective plan in the late 1980s/early 1990s, if we had a NASA administrator who fought for it over the folks who wanted a space station. But it was not to be.
Apollo was 50 years ago. NASA no longer cares about accurate budgets – or keeping to them.
So?
In the mean-time, we had the Space Shuttle, we had ISS. These are real, valid missions, even if they’re not Mars or even the Moon. Their advocates won the political fights in NASA and Congress in the 1980s and 1990s.
I’m trying to google this. I would like to read about how NASA’s budgets were more accurate back in the 60’s.
Here, did find, via the wiki article about Apollo https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… including the section on budgets, a link to:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov…
Good stuff. No doubt Webb was special and the irony of the budget behemoth of a telescope, named “in his honor” must really ruffle the feathers of his ghost.
Frankly, the main lesson learned after Constellation, call it negative-learning, included never again doing long term budgeting, meaning no long term planning. Gerst has been adamant about this since at least 2011.
As time went by, the whole Journey to Mars thing crept up, taking glossy coffee table brochures to a whole new level of fluff. This was another lesson learned, again negative-learning, that some vision had to be marketed, in reply to criticism about lack of plans that added up or made sense.
Call it NASA spaceflight PTSD. Please take the sandcharts down.
Sad, I know.
You, and others, have pointed out the lack of real support in Congress or from the President. That’s an issue, but I can’t say NASA is blameless. I think NASA is, in many respects, less capable than it was in the 1960s. Not in terms of technology, obviously, but in terms of institutional ability to use the technology.
For unmanned, scientific missions (my specialty), I frequently hear people who worked on a mission ten or twenty years ago, saying that it would be impossible to fly the same mission today. Requirements for cost, schedule and mass margin have gone up, as have requirements for risk reduction. I think this is part of a general principle of dealing with problems. Even if it’s minor and worked around, the usual practice is to add procedures, processes and/or requirements to make sure the problem never comes up again. Those rules stay in the system; there isn’t a mechanism for deciding they are obsolete and removing them. (E.g. communications between ground control and the antenna are subject to rules more appropriate to 1970s telephone technology than instant, reliable internet connections.) This, and an aversion to risk, have built up over the years and made the whole system less efficient.
Good post. I don’t think NASA is blameless either, but I don’t think they’re mostly responsible for it – only partially. The constraints on what they can do have gotten much tighter.
“Then I was told by NASA that we’d be on Mars by 1981. Sure, why not. Now in 2015”
Not saying it was possible, but the amount of $ dedicated to Apollo, applied to MARS might have gotten you to Mars by now. Forgetting the mismanagement of funds (there were contractors in the Apollo days too), it is hard to say what would have been possible if the same emotional drive and financial commitment had been made to the trip to Mars.
The 2005 Congress once had the worse space policy ever by guaranteeing that the LV fleet would not be consolidated and guaranteeing economic access to space would not be achieved for 20 years. Wait .. for …it.. This back door deal casts in concrete a very long term plan to retain an unaffordable HLV and architecture based on deceitful data, gives the beast a multi-B mission, then funds ‘commercial’ but guarantees no role in the BEO architecture: ‘comm’ is shifted to the operations account which splashes down with ISS.
Most of the NASA scientists and engineers have NO say in the architecture nor the billion dollar missions. They are the ones who work in service to this country, in search of the answers to the questions unknown. They understand that Innovation and Creativity are the foundation on which are economy is really founded, their primary passion is to not ‘make a buck’. They ‘challenge’ NASA to build ‘something else’. Instead, NASA HSF is basically decades old expendable engine programs with nothing to do, looking for handouts.
Competition means duplication and excess capacity when it comes to LVs. NASA will certify an expendable LV that will be retired and the billions cheaper LV and architecture with gas stations is cast aside once again for ‘distributed’ launch. There is zero potential for any new economy or spinoff with this approach as launch costs remain at $10,000/kg+. Zero. Consolidate Atlas/Delta/SLS into one smaller LV instead with no solids and focus R&D on reuse.
Within Sight..Within Reach…but not Within Us….Why?
It’s NASA’s fault because of the numerous tainted flawed ‘trade’ studies geared to eliminate options early on, where the assumptions/ground rules have already determined the outcome. Its based on a group of folks who cannot give up their decades old hardware, their current ‘job’, and build an architecture and LVs conceived decades ago. Alternative options, 10s of feet deep, are buried. ‘Obedient workers’. Self sustainment has become the purpose, along with make a buck versus the environment. Buying things they don’t need, nor like.
Yes SLS/Orion are the gifts that keep on giving….they keep reaffirming that with a barrage of misinformation and constant confirmation of biases, one can brainwash the public into accepting bad policies and create ‘issues’ to garner votes. Any of these subsidies create American manufacturing jobs? Decades of failed policies and nothing to show for it..yet they continue..so sad. To infinity and beyond…infinity is the time scale.
Good companies are selling lending services…another bubble is about to appear as capitalism must transcend yet another bound.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3…
http://www.forbes.com/sites…
https://youtu.be/kJ4SSvVbhL…
“Reach” — great commercial, and good for anytime. But NASA is a government agency funded by public money, and as someone has said on the internet, we have the worst political class we’ve ever had.
Also, while Apollo showed what can be done when various special interests coincide, it usually takes just such a coincidence to bring about Apollo-size plans. The last 50 years has shown how rare this is in modern American society.
Apollo was the last, glorious event of America’s “mid-century moment,” as (I think) Michael Barone called it.
While I won’t be quite 80 in 2035 like Keith I remember well the many direct and indirect promises that “men would soon be walking on mars”. Many seem to lay the blame directly with congress and successive presidents who have barely paid lip service to the space program, while I think there is a point to be made there I also like Keith think NASA itself must shoulder a good portion of the blame, a big problem I see is that since Apollo NASA has been reactive rather than active, too few in the upper echelons of NASA have been prepared to stick their neck out and tell the powers that be the truth, instead most preferring to “go with the flow” to safeguard their own positions and avoid rocking the boat, if no one is prepared to tell congress or the president they’re on the wrong track and back that up with their job if need be then things will simply go from bad to worse, the truth sometimes hurts but the truth is the only way to put things right, at the moment NASA is working on orion and SLS, in reality these will only at best come on line in the 2020’s, by which time the like of Space-X will quite possibly have made both virtually obsolete, Clearly private enterprise is rapidly emerging as entirely capable of of developing space technology in a far more efficient and cost effective manner than NASA, NASA needs to tell it’s masters that the way it works needs to change and adapt to this new reality, I firmly believe there is still a big and important role for NASA but they need to be able to act quickly and decisively in what has become a very dynamic and evolving business, this might be a somewhat unpalatable truth for some who simply wish to maintain the status quo which has served and continues to serve their own interests and constituencies well but it’s a truth which needs to be told even if some end up putting their heads on the proverbial block to do so.
I’m the same age. I have lost hope that we will see any humans on Mars in our lifetimes. I doubt we will have people on the moon again in my lifetime.
NASA is not on a path that takes people to Mars or anyplace else.
Look at the time and money being devoted to Orion, which is a capsule that cannot get humans to Mars. On the current plan and schedule, Orion is ready to start cis-lunar trips in the mid to late 2020’s. Will it be safe to do so? After Apollo 13 the criteria was that in order to start out for the Moon you had to have a functional backup spacecraft-a LM. So I am not sure they’ll ever certify an Orion, on its own, to go into a lunar, let alone a Mars trajectory. And landers or habitat modules to provide landing capabilities or redundancy are at least 15 years beyond Orion-so if Orion is ready in 2025, then we aren’t going anywhere til the 2040’s. That is assuming they do better on the next spaceship’s development than they’re doing now on Orion, and based on the past 30 years of experience, that is unlikely.
NASA’s mistake was in not getting the cost and operational flexibility of Shuttle fixed and in not building a capable infrastructure for earth to space and earth orbit. This would have taken serious changes to the Shuttle vehicle. But the operations mentality that developed instead decided Shuttle was like the venerable B-52-old, but perfectly functional, and let’s keep it going. That was a mistake. Then when they had the opportunity to bring forward proposals for offshoots of Shuttle, they decided instead just to trash the whole thing. That was another mistake.
There have also been plenty of opportunities to bring forward proposals for cis-lunar vehicles that could cruise in high earth orbit, and then lunar and even planetary trajectories, based on the elements and systems of the ISS. NASA has never proposed this, and instead was adamant, 10 years ago, that the best approach was to throw away ISS and start with Apollo redux, Constellation. Another mistake.
Orion will not get anyone anywhere. It needs some other important pieces and in fact if you take a look at redundancies between Orion, Soyuz, Dragon and CST, Orion is not needed at all. It is just a money pit. You could say its a way to keep a contractor going, but the contractor could be working on something more important, like the trans planetary vehicle or the lander. Another return capsule is not needed. Going with Orion also means we are going to throw away the lunar or Mars spacecraft every mission. Gerst and Hale and others whined about how Shuttle was too expensive-Orion and SLS with far less capability will be so expensive we will not be able to fly it more often than once every year or two. At that rate it is not even safe.
A couple weeks ago at MIT Mike Collins was asked, from his experience having orbited the moon alone on Apollo, was it worthwhile to consider sending an Orion to orbit around the moon or on a trip to Mars? His answer-“no”-why take a cross country trip and build such a capability at such great expense, just to go and look out a window? What a waste.
Within NASA human space flight they have a real “NOT INVENTED HERE” problem in which every generation wants to trash what the prior generation built in order to design and build something that is going to be new, different and better. So, I believe that the fault lies largely with NASA. Apollo required a huge kick start in the early to mid-60’s in order to build a lot of the required infrastructure, but by 66 the spending was coming way down. Budgets stabilized in the 70’s. Shuttle’s initial development was within the budget plan. It is possible to do a lot with the kind of budget NASA has gotten. Don’t forget NASA’s budget is huge by comparison with those human space flight budgets of all the other nations of the earth, combined.
NASA began to lose budget in real terms in the last 20 years when the US saw that NASA was doing little with what it had been given. For those of us in Keith’s age bracket, the mission is largely over. I place the fault with NASA-including many of those who hold the current leadership positions.
Reach was a good commercial but NASA has been showing that it does not have it within itself anymore.
“NASA doesn’t have it within themselves to do Mars and longer”.
I disagree.
I think at the technical level NASA has never been more capable than they are today. They are missing valuable, applicable experience. Unfortunately they are not building experience by keeping a huge organization focused on operations while they have no new capabilities in development.
More significantly, they are missing capable leadership. All they have is the leadership that got them started on a rehash of the Apollo program from 50 years ago. That was not brilliant thinking. That was the beginning of the demise of US human space flight program.
Another blogger up above said that Gerst has learned not to do long term budgeting, and also he learned not to do slick marketing, like to tell everyone that we are on the way to Mars. These were evidence of critical knowledge that required some semblance of strategic thinking, and NASA human space flight leadership showed they did not have the requisite knowledge or the ability to think strategically. (Its interesting because the people who did the Reach commercial 10 years ago knew what was real and what strategic thinking was all about. Apparently Gerst missed that lesson.)
I think he has also learned some other hard lessons in the last ten years. He learned that science and utilization are part and parcel of the space program, and he could not afford to cut those efforts just simply because a fraction of his workforce was focused on ISS assembly operations. He managed, in cutting those science and utilization budgets, to slit the throats of the same organizations and scientists that his predecessors had been nurturing for 50 years. One lesson he has not yet learned is that education is the best form of marketing the human space flight program has, and so he has been on a campaign to take the already minuscule education budget and put it into engineering and design (not sure what he is engineering and designing, though; NASA isn’t developing much).
These were all lessons his predecessors knew. Gerst, like Griffin, and he has Bolden’s ear too, is a chauvinistic operations engineer. He seems to think that is or should be NASA’s sole focus.
I am afraid that by the time the current leadership learns the necessary lessons and put them into practice, they will have trashed the entire program.
Everyone (except Joe) seems to be forgetting the Cold War. I was watching The Sixties and The Seventies on CNN, and literally nearly every sentence spoken about technology and space mentioned the Russians – from kids and housewives to reporters and politicians.
That seems to be the difference – competition and fear then that was way stronger than the voices of any naysayers and lack of other support. The resources, mandate, and plan for Apollo didn’t just happen because NASA alone had the will, and even with all that the odds were stacked against.
Today in 2015, NASA is old and set in its ways. How can you tell an old, massive organization to stop being what it is, any more than you can tell an old man to stop being one? Uh, how many times has the agency been told that its culture must change, in the face of disaster, and how many times has it pretty much not changed? And the people running it, many of them have been at NASA for 20 or 30 years. Or even longer, all likely inspired by the Apollo days. Do you think that THEY can change NASA, especially knowing that they already have a substantial record of NOT changing it? And I’m talking about a LOT of people all across the country who lead in various capacities. Aging organizations should not be asked “why aren’t you like you were fifty years ago?” Mars isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom and not really the point.
You can’t blame NASA for thinking that a destination is the way because it WAS the way. Any of us who are of a certain age can relate…you put on your tennis shoes and your jersey and shorts. You step onto the court. You have the vivid muscle and intellectual memory of the game. But, you just can’t do what you used to twenty years ago. You’re not as fast, you tire more easily, and sometimes things just don’t go the way you expect, the way they should. Maybe you were even the best in the world, but…not so much anymore. Plus, the game is totally different than it used to be, even though you’ve been around and were so confident you could just stay or jump back in. It’s time to play a different game or a different role. You must adapt.
This is kind of everyone’s story. It’s also the story of AOL, of IBM and Apple, of Kobe Bryant, and of NASA. It’s really nothing new, except that it’s the federal government (maybe). Meanwhile, the hope for humans on Mars fades into the distance YET countless amazing things are being accomplished at NASA every single day that no one “out there” seems to know or care much about. Wouldn’t you know it, NASA DOES have other missions and reasons for existing! Let’s see, first and foremost, “aeronautics and space” (as in that great big Universe out there way beyond our neighborhood).
So, as Linus from Peanuts once said: “But did you notice something, Charlie Brown? The world didn’t come to an end.”
NASA was ready to do Apollo extensibility and make mars happen. The NERVA engine was ready. But when it came time to build shuttle in addition to continuing Saturn v, the federal executive branch decided to go shuttle only. Shuttle ended up costing a lot more than estimated, so maybe the mars program would have never worked the way it was imagined by von Braun, but I believe we could have got there if authorized and funded. Now we are here again with NASA not getting budget to accomplish the mission that both it and congress want to do. Agree that NASA isn’t blameless in all this, but I do believe they are executing on the programs funding is provided for and those pieces will be useful once all the other required pieces are in place. Can’t blame NASA for lack of progress when the other necessary pieces aren’t funded. This last few months has been good progress though, with the TRL 5 contracts for the space engines, start of good faith transport hab development, and directive to proceed with block 1B on EM-2.
Full disclaimer: I work on the SLS program for a contractor. Yes it’s not the most efficient of programs and without issues, but we are getting there. We will need more than SLS, Orion, and GSDO to get to mars though.
May i ask, why do you believe this?
Read the jsc history series. shuttle lost out to Titan ‘III’–(with solids) unless it flew 28 times per year. Max Faget–solids a major mistake, added by Nixon. NASA internal studies clearly show the same set of 15 missions set can be accomplished for 60B less.
http://www.nss.org/resource…
http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/his…
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3…
Something I’ve always wondered, and perhaps the smart guys here with actual experience at NASA have some insight: did the decision to strip the Agency of employees in favor of ‘privatization’ and use of subcontractors at the same time compromise long-term institutional experience?
It’s a broad question for sure. Is NASA now an agency of managers?
If you go back to the mid-1980s and before, subsystem managers controlled hardware specifications, design, testing, certification, and flight to flight management for Shuttle and other programs. For instance if you were a subsystem manager on Shuttle doing the hardware maintenance, then you were likely called in to also do the hardware specification and design requirements for Space Station, so there was continuity of experience. Also most likely the subsystem managers from Apollo and Skylab had also been in your same organization and guided the newbies assigned on the new programs. All of those subsystem managers were NASA. When the STSOC consolidation contract came in, starting in FY 1986, engineering and other organizations were forced to give up the subsystem manager role to the new United Space Alliance contractor. Challenger occurred about the same time which was a good thing for the contractor because there was no way they would have been able to take over immediately.
The whole idea was going to be for the USA contractor to privatize Shuttle, but that never happened and Shuttle never got cheaper to operate.
At that point the NASA technical organizations lost the technical responsibilities for their hardware-often they did not even have the management oversight responsibilities any longer.
When the Mission Operations organization was supposed to give up their responsibilities to USA, they refused and eventually there was a shared responsibility – half contractor and half NASA civil servant-but only in operations-worked out.
Also being formed about this time was Space Station. Especially after 1992, when an entirely new ISS organization took over, there were large numbers of now high level Station managers with little if any hardware or systems experience, and they preferred not working with the experienced NASA technical organizations (I think the were threatened by those with experience).
Between the two programs, at that point most NASA technical personnel in human space flight had never had their hands on real hardware responsibilities. So yes, in most instances, there was little continuity of technical hardware management and most NASA civil servants became managers “without portfolio”. They’d never worked on real hardware before. Those of us who did real hardware in the 80s or earlier are now getting to or well past retirement age.
Please. In case you haven’t noticed, NASA robots are exploring Mars now for a fraction of what it would cost too send humans. NASA is exploring the outer planets and Pluto. NASA detects planets in exo-solar systems (we’re not going to get there with people any time soon). NASA images galaxies billions of light years away. NASA sees the oldest photons in the universe from space when the universe was beginning.
Update what it means to explore, it isn’t what you were ‘promised’ 50 years ago. NASA’s future is bright.
It most certainly is about what I – and others- have been promised by NASA for half a century. Your love of robots clearly means you are against putting humans on Mars. You are part of the problem. Who do you work for, BTW? Pete kettle black.
I’m a fan of the manned program, and sending people to Mars. All I am saying here is that NASA has made some spectacular progress in other areas and should be congratulated, the gloom and doom in this piece and the comments is too much. Unfortunately I don’t see the political will to being back the old Apollo days. Rather it were not so, but we have to use what we’ve got as best we can.