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Originally Posted by RN7
...NASA seems to have been punished for bad management and the squandering its resources by the politicians and bureaucracy that runs it, at the expense of its highly capable scientists, engineers and astronauts.
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Well said. The Apollo program did its job so well that the political support for Apollo withered on the vine. Ever since then, NASA has been run by bureaucrats, not scientists and engineers.
Quote:
Originally Posted by ShadoWarrior
It was the USAF that forced NASA into so many spec changes that we ended up with the costly, klunky kluge that's been flying since '81.
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This underscores the problem that military men are military men. Putting the USAF in charge of the US space program would be like putting the US Navy in charge of merchant shipping. Without making any claims about the degree to which space has been militarized already, we should pursue a philosophy of minimizing and retarding the militarization of space instead of giving militarization a de facto embrace by bringing the USAF into it any more than they already are. Sooner or later, there will be an armed presence in space far more significant than anything we can point to today. At one end of the spectrum is a set of competing forces busting budgets in Cold War fashion to ensure that each nation’s commercial interests in space are “protected” against interference by the forces of competing nations. At the other end of the spectrum is a small constabulary-type force in operation to enforce agreed-upon rules for all commercial interests regardless of national origin. We should pursue policies to get as far towards the latter end of the spectrum as possible.