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> Certainly, but I wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking naively that things would be better if only NASA had much more money. I've had several highly intell

> Certainly, but I wouldn't fall into the trap of thinking naively that things would be better if only NASA had much more money. I've had several highly intelligent & competent friends opt to not work at NASA because the salary was 66% of competing offers where they would still be doing cools things. With some more money, NASA could have competitive salaries to attract more talent.

InclinedPlane 12y ago
NASA has a tremendous pool of talent, that's not the problem. The problem is the bureaucracy and the organization. Just compare the unmanned vs manned parts of NASA. On the unmanned side there is a huge diversity of projects, mission architectures, and destinations, and a lot of recent accomplishments across the Solar System. They take the effort to separate out technological development projects, they use incremental development processes, they build on what they've accomplished previously, they deal with budget constraints in sensible ways, etc. They still have huge problems from time to time and are still hugely bureaucracy heavy, but they get things done. On the manned side things are completely different. The average project is some huge multi-billion dollar venture of questionable value, with a reasonable chance the project will be cancelled partway through (X-33/VentureStar, Constellation, etc.) In large part a lot of the blame for that falls on LBJ and the way he pushed the Apollo program through congress. LBJ was a consummate politician and he used every political horse trading trick in the book to make Apollo happen, largely by siting manufacturing and staffing in powerful congressional districts, funneling funding to those areas. A situation that has continued to exist through the present day and is a huge driver for the shape of NASA manned spaceflight (it is the entire reason the SLS exists, for example).
- bsilvereagle 12y ago
  > NASA has a tremendous pool of talent Yes, they're all retiring. All the up and coming talent is going elsewhere because they don't have to deal with mountains of paperwork to buy $50 worth of parts.

InclinedPlane 12y ago

NASA has a tremendous pool of talent, that's not the problem. The problem is the bureaucracy and the organization. Just compare the unmanned vs manned parts of NASA. On the unmanned side there is a huge diversity of projects, mission architectures, and destinations, and a lot of recent accomplishments across the Solar System. They take the effort to separate out technological development projects, they use incremental development processes, they build on what they've accomplished previously, they deal with budget constraints in sensible ways, etc. They still have huge problems from time to time and are still hugely bureaucracy heavy, but they get things done. On the manned side things are completely different. The average project is some huge multi-billion dollar venture of questionable value, with a reasonable chance the project will be cancelled partway through (X-33/VentureStar, Constellation, etc.) In large part a lot of the blame for that falls on LBJ and the way he pushed the Apollo program through congress. LBJ was a consummate politician and he used every political horse trading trick in the book to make Apollo happen, largely by siting manufacturing and staffing in powerful congressional districts, funneling funding to those areas. A situation that has continued to exist through the present day and is a huge driver for the shape of NASA manned spaceflight (it is the entire reason the SLS exists, for example).

bsilvereagle 12y ago
> NASA has a tremendous pool of talent Yes, they're all retiring. All the up and coming talent is going elsewhere because they don't have to deal with mountains of paperwork to buy $50 worth of parts.