The Sad State of NASA

In the wake of the Columbia Disaster (February 1, 2003), it was determined that the space shuttle would be retired by 2010 and would thus need a replacement.  The initial replacement was the Constellation Program (begun in 2005) with the goal of launching astronauts into space by 2014.  President Obama cancelled the Constellation Program in 2009.  The Space Launch System (SLS) was started in 2010, replacing the Constellation Program.  The last space shuttle mission was flown in July of 2011.  This article has NASA putting astronauts in space in 2019 at the soonest but more likely 2021, a ten year gap in manned NASA launches.  So, knowing that the shuttle needed a successor, NASA will have spent 16 years to make it (2005 to 2021).

 

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik and the Space Race.  Project Mercury saw its first rocket test on August 21, 1959.  Called Little Joe 1, it was a failure.  By December of that year, Sam the chimpanzee was launched into space.  In May of 1961, Alan Shepard became the first American in space.  NASA knew that Mercury was just the beginning and had the two-man capsules of Gemini ready for a test launch (April 1964) less than a year after the last Mercury rocket launched (May 1963).  The first Gemini manned mission was in May 1965.  Gemini wrapped up its 10 manned mission run in November of 1966.  In January 1967, the Apollo Program suffered a disastrous fire on the launch pad, killing 3 astronauts.  Even with the disaster, Apollo 7 launched in October of the following year.  Apollo 11 was on the moon in July 1969, less than 10 years since Little Joe 1.  Apollo 17 was the last moon landing.  Remaining rockets for further moon missions were used for Skylab, which was launched in May 1973.  The last of the Apollo rockets was used for the Apollo-Soyuz test in July 1975, which saw US astronauts shake hands with Soviet Cosmonauts in space.  US spaceflight ended until the shuttle was ready.  US spaceflight resumed on April 14, 1981, a gap of just under 6 years.  To duplicate that, we would need to launch astronauts in the next two months.

 

Clearly, NASA does not enjoy the budget it had during the 1960s but modern technology should dramatically reduce the costs and development time.  Really, if you have seen Hidden Figures in which all the calculations were done by hand with pencil, paper, and slide rules, how can progress not go much faster?  Instead, it is taking vastly longer to do things that we were doing more than 40 years ago.  NASA has suffered the fate of most government bureaucracies.  When it began, it had a purpose and clear goals.  Today it has an organizational chart and a budget.  Rather than having projects that need to get done, they are trying to find things to do, to keep busy, to defend their funding.