The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The Space Shuttle was supposed to provide cheap ($500/lb), safe and routine access to Low Earth Orbit. The original Space Shuttle designs as proposed by Maxime Faget might even have achieved those goals. Instead, the Space Shuttle achieved none of its intended goals and became a money eating albatross around NASA's neck.

Here's something that I've observed about NASA: For the most part, the individual managers at NASA are intelligent, competent and very sincere about doing their jobs well. Unfortunately NASA is incredibly top heavy and tightly constrained by political and funding restrictions. I would guess there are at least ten layers of management between the top guy who say's "Do this thing!" and the lowly engineer who actually produces the working drawings. For the SR-71, there was one layer of managment, i.e. Kelly Johnson directly managing the design engineers from one set of blue prints.

Have you ever played "telephone" as a kid? You whisper a story into one kid's ear then he whispers the story to another kid and so one. After going through ten kids, the story is completely changed into some random concoction. Add to this process, the random influence of Congressional political whim and you have described NASA's management model. You could replace the whole thing with a pretty girl in a string bikini spinning a roulette wheel. Actually, I'd much prefer the pretty girl in a bikini version because it would be pleasant to watch.

Gary