Now, I’m never one to praise most former or present government officials, but even in the race of the slow, somebody must win.
Landing on the Moon is perhaps the greatest scientific achievement of the human race to date. How did they do it? During the 1960s, NASA was not run by people with doctorates in sciences, nor by government-first bureaucracy types, nor by people who wanted to please the current administration at the cost of science. The agency was run by people with bachelors degrees, with a sense of achieving the impossible and a refusal to take no for an answer. But after the glory days of Apollo, NASA quickly fell into bureaucracy, redundancy and lassitude.
The Shuttle program, once meant to launch craft every two weeks at a relatively low cost, became only a faint shadow of the original dream. Each shuttle became able to launch only once ever two years or so. The tragedy of the Challenger explosion showed that NASA was now launching by political priority and not scientific goals.
In 1992, the agency was taken over by someone who had a vision of a space administration without the usual huge budgets and modest results. His motto was “faster, better, cheaper,” and for a while, it worked. It was during his tenure that NASA repaired the Hubble Space Telescope, landed the Pathfinder spacecraft on Mars (and broadcast its live video images 750 million times around the world), and managed to fly more craft to study Earth than had been planned at half the projected cost. Goldin had a goal of reducing the time it took to produce new spacecraft two-and-a-half times, launch four times as many missions, all while reducing the cost of new missions by two-thirds. He reduced the size of NASA by 1/3 and contractors by half, without the use of forced lay-offs. For years, Dan Goldin’s leadership made NASA truly “faster, better, [and] cheaper.” One-hundred and sixty out of one-hundred and seventy-one missions under Goldin were successes. The National Journal stated that Goldin was “a brilliant visionary who brought NASA back from the brink of a black hole."
But, just like trying to feed granola bars to cats, a healthy diet for private industry didn’t work for long within the confines of government. The Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander spacecraft were lost at the red planet in a quick one-two during the Autumn of 1999 that would knock out Goldin’s leadership. The overt causes were simple - in the case of the Climate Orbiter, just a mathematical error in converting from English to metric units. But there was another reason, as well: political expediency. In an interview with Donna Shirley published on Space.com in January, 2000, the former JPL manager stated: “Originally the whole Mars Surveyor program talked about flying orbiters to recover Mars Observer science. The plan changed because NASA Headquarters decided that politically it would sell better if we had a lander as well as an orbiter on each opportunity. If we had flown two orbiters, they could've been carbon copies of one another, which would've saved a lot of money and reduced risk.”
However, the losses gave those who saw financial responsibility as a scapegoat for failure a reason to latch onto Goldin’s small-government philosophy as the cause of the spacecraft losses. Never mind that this same idea gave NASA its greatest days in twenty-five years, since this was government, someone had to take the blame. Hence, Goldin stepped down in 2001. So does “faster, better cheaper” work? Yes. But not in government.
Just twenty-five years ago, home computers were lucky to have 16k of memory. Now, even RAM memory in computers or digital camera cards the size of postage stamps can contain over sixty thousand times as much information. Sure, it works in computers, but could it also work for spacecraft? The answer here is also yes. In the Fall of 2004, for around twenty million dollars, Burt Rutan and his companies, Space Development Corp. and Scaled Composites, designed, built and flew Space Ship One. With this craft, they were able to do what NASA has never been able to do: fly the same spacecraft into space twice in less than two weeks. This was the original goal of the Space Shuttle, never achieved by the government organization.
Goldin was a voice of reason and success within government, but Rutan made the dream come true. If Goldin is looking for a new project, he may be well advised to work with Rutan on private planetary exploration, funded by philanthropists. I want to see what’s out there, and I am not willing to wait for government to do it.
