Rand Simberg celebrates NASA's 45th birthday with a recap of the agency's successes and an assessment of its ongoing problems. He concludes with some food for thought:
It's often noted that insanity can be defined as doing the same thing over and over, and expecting to get different results. By that definition, our current space policy continues to be insane.
For humans, with modern nutrition and medicine, age forty-five is now considered, at least in the west, to be the prime of life. But for government bureaucracies, it can be an age that's over the hill and down the other side, perhaps deep in their dotage. This is particularly the case when the political circumstances that brought about their creation disappeared years, if not decades ago.
While euthanasia remains a controversial topic for humans, it shouldn't be off the table for an agency that may have lived long past its usefullness. But abandoning a flawed governmental approach need not mean an abandoning of the high frontier. In fact, it may be a necessary first step.
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: Chris Hall (you'll have to scroll down; permalinks don't seem to be working) has a somewhat different take on how NASA should be assessed.
Posted by Phil at October 1, 2003 04:28 PM | TrackBack