🚀 go-pugleaf

Bashing the U.S.  space program seems to be very much in vogue these
days.  Our long-term position, it has been claimed, has badly
deteriorated, this being a result of short-sighted policy making.

I beg to disagree.

The problems in our current space program are not the result of
short-sightedness so much as long-sightedness on the part of NASA 
coupled with blindness on the part of Congress; our problems are not
so much long-term as short-term.  

What do I mean?

Even granting its problems, we DO have the shuttle; no-one else
presently has anything nearly as zippy.  This is an important
long-term asset.  The problem is that it is not as good in the
short-term as had been billed; NASA oversold the STS as the sole
solution to our near-term orbital needs.  This led to the
disasterous policy of scrapping our expendible launch capability.  

I speculate that this happened because of NASA's judgement that,
a re-usable space transport is, in the long term, essential.  The
problem came about when NASA's vision came into collision with
Congress's blindness with respect to funding the space program; to
get the shuttle at all, they had to oversell it.  This also led to
the Challenger accident; NASA got out onto a limb in overselling the
shuttle initially; they were under intense pressure to deliver on
their promises.  So, when technical problems kept causing schedule
slip, NASA got sloppy.

So where are we left?

We have some serious short-term (the next 5 years) problems; U.S.
space activity has ground to a halt, and will not recover for a
while.  However, recovery is certain, provided sufficient money is
forthcoming.  Come on now, we know how to build expendable lift
vehicles; there is no fundamental problem stamping out more Titans
and designing a new heavy-lift vehicle.  A few years and a few
billion dollars, and our short-term problems will be solved.

The real long-term problem is Congress:  they have to realize
that space is the growth industry of the 21'st century; that we have
certain short term needs, but that if they don't provide enough
money to solve both short-term and long-term problems, one or the
other will suffer.  Fortunately (or we would be in fundamentally
bigger trouble than we are now), NASA succeeded (in the 1970's) in
keeping the focus on the long term problems with the Shuttle
program. 

If congress forces NASA to focus on our short-term problems, but does
not provide sufficient money to attack both the short-term and
long-term, we are doomed to lose, and all our 30-year old space
program will have done is to have created yet another industry for
the Japanese to come in and kick our butts in.