What is the future of NASA, given the rise of the private space travel industry?
NASA is using government money to try to do several things at once. It is trying to keep the shuttle flying, and every time it has an accident, it adds thousands more engineers and programmers who do more and more work. The more you fly, the more man-hours it takes to fly, rather than less. At the same time, NASA is trying to go out and develop something that can service the space station and also go to the moon and to Mars. This means we have a whole new generation of designers at NASA who are precluded from going out and looking for breakthroughs. They are forced into building a shuttle replacement using hardware from the ’60s and ’70s. They are using for the second-stage rocket engine essentially the same engine that was on the Saturn [upper stages], which is a very low-tech steel-cased engine. They do this because it would cost more to go out and invent something new, because to invent something new you have to try things that you don’t know will work. They worry that if things don
