http://www.spacedaily.com/news/spacetravel-05v.html

In the beginning paragraphs of this article, I didn't recognize who the author was, and it was somewhat boring and this was part of the reason why I was wondering who wrote it. But I plough on hoping it would improve and it did. As I was reading further I thinking this is interesting and I should quote this and this. But I was also noting bad conclusions and glaring inconstancies at same time the author was pointing out similar inconstancies in others.
I kept on reading and thinking, gosh this is really a target rich environment, but shouldn't I be getting somewhere close to end of reading all of this yet?
So, I thought I'll page down and see how much is left and check out who this author is. Scroll, scroll, scroll. Oh, that explains it, it's Dr Robert Zubrin.
As I said there is some interesting stuff here. One thing is Zubrin divides NASA into two eras: Apollo and Shuttle and describes these as different organizational cultures. This interesting analogy and I would say is a real issue, but then he makes the mistake of dismissing the structural nature of these cultures. He seems to imagine that all you need to do is make a few decisions and this culture will transform within a few weeks or years. It just doesn't work that way.
And Zurbin seems to critize Bush for making too many compromises. Bush or any leader NEEDS to make compromises. Bush isn't a dicator, nor is he going to do any anything too drastic, especially when considering he's got a War against Terrorism, recovering from 911, and a recession. Even without these factors, NASA is a political mine field which guarantees political opposition if anything significant is attempted, other than pour more money at it- and NASA has had increases in it's budget at time when others agencies are keeping with inflation or deceases- and that's another compromise considering that at the time NASA wasn't even flying the Shuttle.
NASA is a house full of stair leading nowhere, structural walls missing, etc. First thing you do is stop more construction on more stairs leading nowhere and stop the destruction of load bearing walls, and start clearing up the joint. When an Agency "loses" 4 billion dollars, there are big problems in finance- and that is a load bearing wall in regards to whether NASA get any congessional funding- hopefully this problem is fixed, but it only a hope.
Now, NASA is pretty good in comparison to other govt agencies and even being merely a jobs program it's not as bad other some govt programs.
Anyway, this article promises to have many thing to discuss, but first I need to finish reading it.