Posted on 05/05/2004 4:29:29 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
NASA faces a major transformation if the 45-year-old agency is to achieve President Bush's goals of returning explorers to the moon and sending manned missions to Mars, members of a White House advisory panel said Tuesday.
The proposed changes that will be spelled out in a report from the President's Commission on Moon, Mars and Beyond in early June would likely mean a higher level of federal oversight as well as closer links to private industry, the military and other government agencies.
Without the transformation, the space agency will not get the public, political and financial support that will be required to achieve the ambitious exploration goals outlined by Bush on Jan. 14, commission members said.
"The NASA organization must be more integrated, focused and aligned with the new mission," said Edward "Pete" Aldridge, the former Air Force secretary who chairs the nine-member commission. "Our ability to do this will be declining over time as the skill and industrial base are declining over time."
The panel met in New York City on Monday and Tuesday, the final stop on a five-city, fact-finding trip in which it listened to experts from aerospace, the military, labor, the investment community, foreign space agencies, education and entertainment with ideas on how to sustain the unprecedented undertaking.
In many cases, the experts found the modern space agency too wedded to the agency founded at the height of the Cold War to overtake the former Soviet Union's technical prowess.
Commissioner Robert Walker, a former Pennsylvania Republican congressman and House Science Committee chair, was especially critical of the course taken by the space agency after the moon landings, difficulties with the U.S.-led international space station and last year's Columbia accident.
"It's really a case where the culture and the infrastructure that worked so well during the Apollo years has become a hindrance of future development," said Walker. "Apollo was very coherent and singularly focused. It was so successful that NASA began to view itself and many people began to view it as the only way that Americans went into space."
The changes envisioned by the panel would transform NASA into an agency working alongside an industrial partner, academia and parts of other Cabinet-level agencies to expand the nation's economy into space as a means of creating new wealth and strengthening national security as well as advancing science.
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They are mired in a static, bureaucratic mindset that simply can't imagine anything outside of their own little fiefdom.
If NASA is to be saved, solutions will have to come from outside of NASA and the government contractor community.
Music to my ears.
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