Some very good stuff in this article:

...There is no consistent theme or pattern upon which to build long-term plans of action. Big-time projects with goals and budgets come and go in the technological blink of an eye. Politicized managers are so absorbed in watching for programmatic plums to snatch out of the general jumble that no technological sense is made of anything.



...The unfortunate truth, though, is that the moment Neil Armstrong's foot touched the surface of the moon, that all evaporated. We had met the challenge, we had reached the goal, and the question of every day since then has really been "Why waste any more money on space?".

One of the things that always irritates me is how poorly the people at the top answer those questions. Why do we need a space station? What is it going to do for us? Why is it worth the twenty-four billion dollars we've spent so far and the four or six or eight billion more they say it may cost? Even when the question is asked by a Congressman utterly disposed to sending another couple billion to the Great States of Boeing, Johnson, or Marshall, the answers always seem squeamish and unconvincing: to do world-class science, to improve life here, to extend cost overruns there, to boldly go home from this hearing alive (I may have some of these mixed up). These are the answers of the politician talking to the politician.

To the technologist, the answer to why is far easier: to get mankind off this rock. This planet Earth is finite: no matter how harmoniously we live with our environment, no matter how thoroughly we utilize its every resource, it will run out. If we do not find our way off this planet and into the infinity of space, we will overpopulate this planet into a living hell in which the "mercies" of Mother Nature will finally control all and force upon mankind the solutions demanded by a finite world. The knowledge and technology to get mankind off this planet will be beyond anything ever imagined by Gene Roddenberry. The space program does not exist to do world-class science, the world-class science exists to do the space program.

It is because the political answers are used in a political Congress that the Agency drifts on from crisis to crisis. It is because the political answers are used that management has become, very nearly to the grass roots level, political rather than technical. Key decisions costing and distributing millions and billions of dollars are made on a political basis rather than a technical one. Political achievement is rewarded, not technical achievement. Frosting over all of this is the utter hypocrisy pushed constantly by our leaders that the opposite is true, that technologists are wanted and valued and desperately needed when even a blind technologist can see the plain truth before him.



(Boldface enthusiastically mine.)