Orlando Sentinel: At NASA, why T-shirts say WWED? (What would Elon do?)
The Orlando Sentinel’s space writer Robert Block, who has made the cudgeling of NASA a regular practice, takes an oblique route to deliver another story this week that won’t be so welcome at agency headquarters. It opens with a review of the well-covered, recent success of Elon Musk – internet tycoon, electric car man, and fonder of rocket start-up company Space X. It then asks why can’t NASA be that savvy?
He doesn’t varnish his assessment. His story goes from the private sector’s most glamorous rocket man to remarks such as that Musk’s achievements are “raising some serious questions about NASA,” soon says “lack of affordability …is killing NASA” eventually declares the agency may “find itself becoming a historical footnote.”
His primary example of NASA ossification v. entrepreneurial energy and efficiency is to compare dollar figures for SpaceX’s experimental cargo capsule Dragon, which recently made a successful test flight and may soon be delivering material to the international space station, to what NASA has been working on, the Orion space capsule.
Dragon has already been to orbit at a cost of about $800 million for design, test, and flight. The Orion program has soaked up $4.8 billion, and will likely reach $6 billion before first flight in another three years or more.
That may be an apples and oranges in that comparison, but it’s effective. Block stops short of writing NASA’s obit in advance. He also reports there are signs it is learning its lesson, cutting red tape and unneeded complexity in its R&D.
- Charlie Petit
