Armstrong to Nasa: You're embarrassing

Like I've said repeatedly, what is embarrassing is our dependence on forign nations to get to a space station largely funded and built by us. Russia is not our friend. Russia is a business partner with whom we're not at war.

We should have gotten our asses up and had something new by now, so we could retire the shuttle.

Asking how we can shut down the shuttle program "in the middle of its prime" reminds me of the line from Star Wars about the bad guys surrendering "Now? In our moment of triumph?"

I tried to be brief, but your point is taken, if a bit over the top.

Of course you can trust politicians for stuff, just like you can trust your corner grocer not to put poison in your potatoes. The problem, whether the private sector or the government sector, is where there are mixed incentives and no feedback loop. So, for instance, it's a big deal to come out with some vast new NASA goal every time a president gets elected -- but these goals always take decades to make happen, which is long after the current guy is gone. Presidents get mileage out of making the speech and formulating the policy, not making it happen. Likewise, unless you are a congressman from a district with lots of space spending, it's very easy to make speeches with phrases like "why should we go to the moon when we can't even fix our problems down here?" without anybody digging any deeper. So politicians do that. They act rationally.

There are no voters in space. There are no orphans to appear on TV with, and there are no space aliens to defend ourselves against. There's just not a lot up there to emotionally move the electorate, sadly.

In these cases, where the incentives are mixed and there's no reward, you can't trust them because of the role they play in the system as it is currently implemented. And no, I don't mean "can't trust them" as in somehow they are purposefully deceiving anybody or crooked or any of that. Most of them are really smart, dedicated people who want the best for their country. I'm very proud of the politicians and the people who work at NASA. But by acting the most logical way possible, exploration can't prosper. There are no bad guys and no hatred of government here. Space exploration just doesn't work the way it was set up. Sure, as a last great dream of an assassinated president, with a completely new agency, we could hold it together for a decade or so, but those days are long gone. What has been needed for the last 20 years or more is a bit more brave and pointed honesty at NASA. That's maybe too much to ask, but I think guys like Armstrong deserve it.

No, I don't have absolute certainty, but there have been studies on its economic impact: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget#Economic_impact_of_...

This situations represents a failure to understand economics. From the moon race to the period of the XPrize, and even after, NASA and the FCC has stymied private access to space. It is hard to test a launch vehicle if you can't get a launch or even testing (e.g.: static firing) permits. It is hard to start a space tourism business if the person developing your vehicles is barred from showing the CEO of the company the designs (as happened to Virgin Galactic for a couple years because Richard Branson is not a US citizen!)

This should resonate really well with anyone building a startup. A startup is a money engine. You find something that is profitable, and you invest in it and grow it.

You can go out and spend a lot of money doing things the manual way, but if everything pretty much stops when you stop spending money, you're not really investing in a sustainable business.

This is the case with NASA and a lot of government programs. We were spending a lot of money, but we were not building a space industry... in fact, because government bureaucrats saw space as a competitive advantage (NASA, for instance, long enjoyed easy funding from Congress) they worked to stymie private interests that might show them up.

It is great that things are changing now. We have SpaceX building launch vehicles. Virgin Galactic will start their business any day now (hopefully, though remember how congress wanted to shut it down because it might not be "safe"?) Jeff Bezos is doing something off in the desert of west texas, and even John Carmack has a small space business.

But we cannot ignore the legacy of hundreds of billion sunk into NASA on unsustainable programs, and quirky launch vehicles designed to meet bureaucratic needs, such as to at least have one component of it built in each of the 50 states.

So, the news that NASA is in an "embarrassing" state to me, is good news. I say this, because I would very much like to see Humans have ready access to space.