Posted 8/29/2003 12:35:00 PM by Douglas

I've disagreed with Rand Simberg before, most notable about his glib comments about the loss of STS-107 on February 1, but his latest rounds of dissent after the CAIB report was released this week was a bit too much.

There's really not much to debate as to whether or not NASA has lots its direction, or if there is any meaningful science to be gained from low-Earth orbit. He's been parroting that in almost everything he writes, but I don't think that's the point. You just can't compare NASA today with the same agency that brought us Apollo, and comparing it to commercial aviation is even farther off the mark.

Monocultures are fragile. Launch systems designed for the government, of the government and by the government will be doomed to the same failure and fragility as shuttle. We have to have a diversity of means of getting people into orbit, and we have to expand the market beyond NASA in order to get the economies of scale without which we will never get low costs or reliability.

NASA may have a strangle-hold on U.S. manned spaceflight, but it certainly doesn't have one on the heavens. Nor did the Wright brothers monopolize aviation. Anyone with ambition and the ability to secure funding was, and still is, perfectly capable to try their hand at anything they wanted to put in the sky. As the X-Prize clearly demonstrates, this holds true today as well.

So maybe instead of focusing so much energy on where less than 1% of our federal budget is allocated, Mr. Simberg could take the genius of his vast "recovering aerospace engineering" experience and secure private investors to develop his own personal vision of what manned spaceflight should be.

The sky's the limit. Literally.