How important is it to have a comprehensive national strategy for space activity?
You need to have a roadmap and you need to have a plan. You can have a lot of councils; you can have a lot of people. The bottom line is that the way it stands now, you have the Defense Department, which probably has the most influence, then you have the DNI, and you have NASA and you have NOAA; and you need to have more collaboration between all those groups. And you need a direct line to an ultimate decision maker, with more involvement from a congressional point of view, because we provide the funding. What is the greatest challenge facing the space acquisition community today? We’ve had some major failures in the space industry. Our big recommendation in the report was that we were giving out, in some cases, sole-source contracts to the big boys, and what we found is they were doing research and development after they got the contracts. So there needs to be more money and more time spent in the research and development phase before we get to the manufacturing phase. If you really l
