It's official: NASA is a jobs program.

I'd be interested to know if there has ever been a period in history where the size of the federal government has gotten smaller in terms of total employees.<p>Anyone who has ever listened to a government manager talk at any level for any length of time will here them say something to the effect of "we just don't have enough people and resources". Case and point, after hurricane katrina, <a href="http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0806/081896cdpm1.htm" rel="nofollow">http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0806/081896cdpm1.htm</a> FEMA claims they are under staffed.<p>There really is no incentive for anyone in any corner of government to be efficient. If they start doing the same work with less money and less employees it reduces the clout of their department because they have less money and less employees and consequently less power and standing within the system. In business doing something for less increases profit in government there is no such incentive and likely an incentive to the other extreme.

This slide is taken out of context to support the author's own ideology. First off, this slide describes only one of 13 criteria used when deciding on alternatives. This is certainly not the focus of the presentation. This presentation is showing the multitude of objectives that NASA decision makers must take into account when deciding on the future of their program. This is strictly an exercise in Multi Attribute Decision Making [1]. In general, with MADM techniques, you frame the objective as a weighted combination of criteria that you meet with appropriate weightings. We have no idea what "weights" (i.e. importance) were put to this criterion of maintaining workforce.<p>What is wrong with framing _this particular issue_ in this way? Why would any organization, especially one heavily based on knowledge gathering, prioritize a reduction in workforce. Anyone who understands the issues of the aerospace workforce knows that knowledge retention is one of the most important issues facing the industry right now. All of the smart people that got us to the moon and created all of the other aerospace accomplishments of the last 50 years are either retired or very close to retiring. Y'all should understand that people are assets.<p>As an aside, the reason that NASA is so expensive is because it is risk averse. It is risk averse because the public (and Congress) cannot tolerate any failures. They are reacting to public sentiments any time something goes wrong. They have some of the best risk and reliability assessments of any industry (even though they are not perfect). The ONLY way private companies can do better is if they accept more risk. As soon as NASA tried to accept more risk, they were blamed incessantly for having a "management driven culture." What do you think a private company is going to do?<p>[1] <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&#38;q=multi+attribute+decision+making" rel="nofollow">http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&#38;q=multi+attribute+dec...</a>

Can everyone please leave their populist "oh my god everything the government does is so god damn innefficient and if only we dismantle it and let 6 smart people run it instead it would be SO great" yammmering at home for a few decades because the thought of a world without NASA makes me very depressed.<p>It takes thousands of people BECAUSE of all the advances in technology and automation and robotics and computers and so on.<p>I'm just a casual observer and fan, so I don't know if this is actually true, but the Mars rover mission seemed 10x more complicated than the Moon landings. And that's the last one... not the upcoming one that looks even more awesome.<p>NASA is a poorly run, oversized govt agency, but give them credit for accomplishing some of the most amazing feats humanity has ever seen <i>in recent years.</i> And you know what... maybe <i>that's</i> what it takes.

This reminds me of the talk Robert Bussard gave at Google a while back, mentioning the relative efficacy and nimbleness of fusion research programs: his own small-scale, Navy-funded, evolutionary on-the-cheap effort versus the absolutely massive, multi-billion dollar ITER project. He describes the ITER project as a gigantic "rice bowl", whose primary goal is not to <i>discover anything</i> but rather to give a large number of people jobs.

I view the NASA spaceflight program nowadays as a monolithic company with so much bureaucracy that its impossible to make substantial changes without huge efforts. Going along with this analogy, back when they first started they were a startup, albeit one with a huge amount of funding, but one that could try and fail a lot cause the technology was new.

Okay let's fantasize that the staff of NASA was willing to work for $1 / year - and that the cost per kg of sending stuff in to space converges to the energy cost of the chemical rocket fuel. I suspect that space flight is still pretty damn expensive. What happens in space to spacefaring humans that makes them cover the cost of going there plus a profit? Even something as obviously useful as launching communication sattelites is still very costly.

Did you ever wonder why NASA has facilities in Huntsville Alabama? How about the strange split of mission control between Texas and Florida?<p>It's "odd" how NASA facilities are so often located in states that had politically powerful senators at the relevant time.<p>The "Robert Byrd" effect is not new. I'm waiting for them to rename West Virginia after him.

The single-payer model for space flight hasn't yielded cost savings, higher productivity and more innovation? Hmm.

On the side note about most of the goverenment's programs:<p>If there is no demand for your work, you do not do what do you do for love but money and you do not enrich the society in the long term, you are a parasite.

Why's this crap even on HN ? Take your politics to digg.

1. Which government program isn't?<p>2. Is NASA really your #1 concern?

The same is happening in scientific research, although, it is not as obvious: a standing army of PhD's are making progress very difficult by making research expensive.