A science blog with Eric Berger




In short, Kraft is a legend, and therefore not afraid to speak his mind.

Last week I visited Kraft at his home for a long talk about the state of NASA, the agency for which he has devoted his life. He’s deeply troubled about NASA’s future. Among the topics we discuss:

  • Expense and sustainability of the Space Launch System
  • The popularity of NASA’s proposed asteroid mission
  • Whether astronauts like flying to the International Space Station
  • Where humans should go in the solar system

I think it’s safe to say these are viewpoints NASA officials aren’t sharing with President Obama’s administration nor the members of Congress. But having spoken to a number of current NASA officials and even astronauts, many of them will privately express these views as well. Here, then, is the interview:

I know you don’t like NASA’s approach with the Space Launch System. Why is this?

The necessity of having a big rocket is not justifiable. It’s not justifiable from a cost point of view, and it’s not justifiable from a mission plan point of view. It just doesn’t make good sense.

Let’s start with cost. I know it’s expensive.

The problem with the SLS is that it’s so big that makes it very expensive. It’s very expensive to design, it’s very expensive to develop. When they actually start to develop it, the budget is going to go haywire. They’re going to have all kinds of technical and development issues crop up, which will drive the development costs up. Then there are the operating costs of that beast, which will eat NASA alive if they get there. They’re not going to be able to fly it more than once a year, if that. Because they don’t have the budget to do it. So what you’ve got is a beast of a rocket, that would give you all of this capability, which you can’t build because you don’t have the money to build it in the first place, and you can’t operate it if you had it.

Kraft, at Johnson Space Center, in 2007 in front of a Saturn V rocket. (Steve Ueckert/Chronicle)


What is the alternative?

In the private sector we’ve got an Atlas and a Delta rocket, and the Europeans have an Ariane rocket. The Russians have lots of rockets which are very reliable, and they get reliable by using them. And that’s something the SLS will never have. Never. Because you can’t afford to launch it that many times.

This is the approach by which NASA would save a lot of money by using existing rockets, rather than developing its own?

What’s so magic about this being able to lift 120 tons? Why can’t you use what you’ve got and put your vehicles into space in pieces, like you did with the space station? That’s the right way to do it. Eventually you’ll get to the point where, even with a really big rocket, you get to the point where you can’t put everything on there you need to go where you want to go. Whether you want to go to the moon or Mars, you’re going to have to do something in Earth orbit, or maybe lunar orbit, with an assembly capability, a fuel depot capability and the capability to have people operating there sort of as a Cape Canaveral in the sky. Everybody that looks into this comes to the same conclusion. JSC, if you ask them how to do it, is going to tell you the way to do it is with an assembly point in orbit, with fuel depots, where you come together and then go.

In the glory days of NASA you had this huge rocket, the Saturn V. It flew astronauts to the surface of the moon seven times. And after that NASA could no longer afford it. Are we repeating history?

Yes. We’re heading back to that model, only worse. That’s the thing. We’ve got those smarts, we’ve learned that, we have that institutional knowledge, and yet we’re ignoring it. It doesn’t make sense. We’ve got this tremendous capability to put things into orbit, it already exists, and we’re not going to use it. Studies all over the country say this is the right thing to do. It’s a tragedy. It really is.

You’re also not a fan of NASA’s plan to lasso an asteroid, bring it near the moon, and then send humans to stand upon it. Why?

Congress is already saying what NASA is doing is wrong. They’re saying they don’t like the asteroid mission. Most in Congress want to see NASA go back to the moon. So do nearly all of the scientific and technical organizations in the world. China said last week they’re going to go to the moon. They aren’t going just because it’s there, it’s because it’s a place where you want to be from all kinds of points of view, from science, from a resource point of view. There’s no reason why you couldn’t set up a factory on the moon to build solar panels. You could provide enough electrical power on the moon from solar cells, and eventually you could supply enough power for half the people on Earth with a solar cell farm on the moon. I just think the world is going to use the moon for practical purposes. And it makes sense that it should be a worldwide project.

You mean we should involve the Europeans in this?

Exactly. And I know for a fact that the Europeans have told NASA this, that they want to go to the moon, but they say they can’t because NASA won’t do it. We are captured by what NASA wants to do, they say. There are many in top NASA management who would prefer to make a return to the moon as the next step for the US and the rest of the nations involved in the ISS, but are reluctant to say so because of restrictions from the present administration.

Kraft, directing the flight of Gemini 7 in Houston in 1965. (AP Photo)


It seems like a lot of former astronauts, and some current ones who talk to me off the record, feel the same way.

I talked to Neil Armstrong an awful lot near the end of this life. Too bad he’s gone, because he was an important spokesman for being adverse to what the political part of NASA says we’re going to do. Bolden, let’s face it, he doesn’t know what it takes to do a major project. He doesn’t have experience with that. He’s a flier, a Marine general. He’s never known what it takes to do a massive program. He keeps talking about going to Mars in the 2030s, but that’s pure, unadulterated, BS. And what have you got if you get there? Who wants to operate something that’s 40 minutes, by voice, from the Earth. Why would you want to do that? As an operator, damned if I like that. If I’m on the moon, I’ve got a 3 second turnaround. Everything I go to do on Mars I’ve got to prepare to do in an automatic mode. That’s not very smart. Pretty much everything we need to do on Mars can be done robotically. We’ve already got robots there. By the time we get the capability to send humans to Mars, it might be that robots are smarter than humans anyway. I’m serious.

We’re already seeing the impressive capabilities with robots like Curiosity.

Yeah. Exactly. If you think about the practical aspects of going into space, there’s no practical reason for going to Mars. But there is a practical reason for going to the moon. And furthermore, if you really want to go somewhere, get out of this solar system. Eventually that’s what you’re going to have to do. I don’t know how to do that, but we’ll figure out how to do it one day.

A couple of weeks ago I had a pleasant morning at Johnson Space Center where they introduced eight bright, talented and accomplished new astronaut candidates. I couldn’t help but wonder where these men and women were going to fly to.

For the last 10 years they’ve had trouble getting astronauts to go to the space station. I don’t know if you know that, but a lot of people don’t want to go to the space station. They don’t want to spend six months there. Three people have to take care of the station while three people do science. That’s three people 24 hours a day to keep the station operating. It’s not a very good job for an astronaut. Astronauts want to do something that has some excitement to it. The engineers that come to JSC want to do something. You go talk to the guys who were doing Constellation, and the reason they came to NASA was to go back to the moon. They’re all leaving now. The leaders are leaving for a lot of other reasons also, but they’re leaving because there’s no future that they want to be involved in. And that’s unfortunate. You’ve got to have a reason for people to give you their lives. Which is what I did. I gave NASA my life not because they asked me to, but because I wanted to. I had a reason. But I just don’t think that’s there now. The livelihood of the organization is not very good.

I heard that you recently spoke with the Johnson Space Center co-op students who made the wildly popular NASA Johnson Style-video. What did you say to them?

I gave ‘em hell. When the group did the NASA Johnson Style video, when I saw that, I said I want to go and speak to those guys. And so I did. I said look, “You just spent all of this effort to make a movie, how about spending all of that effort in making a space program go? Give me your body and mind and work on those kinds of things. I thought the video was beautiful, but that’s not why you’re here.” I was very honest with them. They are the future of the program. If you can’t keep them interested, you’ve lost it.

Kraft (left), George Low and Robert Gilruth at mission control in 1969. (Houston Chronicle)


Speaking of NASA’s future, it seems like politically it’s expedient to have centers all over the country. But is that the most efficient way to conduct a space program?

George Low (manager of the Apollo program and a NASA administrator) and myself got together in 1975, and he asked me how we could rebuild and reshape NASA to have a vibrant group of people. We knew we had five or six too many centers. We didn’t need that many. Let the Jet Propulsion Laboratory do the unmanned stuff, and have two or three other centers do manned spaceflight. That’s all NASA needed then, and needs now. But politics wouldn’t let us do that. The centers are still going today, and some are getting bigger.

Categories: National, Space
Tags: |
Eric Berger

69 Responses

  1. BOB says:

    Thank you for this article.

  2. JohnD says:

    he certainly doesn’t pull any punches, does he? I agree with his position on the SLS (too costly, mission can be done by existing rockets), but disagree with the idea that we should rely too much on international opinion on what to do next with NASA. Remember, the last time we let international opinion decide where to put our research dollars, we ended up spending $100 billion on a space station that nobody wants to fly to instead of completing the SCSC and the X-33/VentureStar.

    • Bill in Houston says:

      I would have also built the original Space Station Freedom (Power Tower) instead of the ISS.

    • Justin Kugler says:

      As a point of order, we didn’t finish Station instead of X-33/VentureStar. The latter collapsed under the weight of NASA trying to do too many experimental technologies in one program and being unwilling to let Lockheed Martin try to fly X-33 with an aluminum tank.

    • JohnD says:

      Justin, that’s fair enough. But if we had started work on the X-33 before deciding to work on the ISS instead of after, I suspect that the requirement that the X-33 include the cryogenic tanks would have been dropped (especially as they increased the final weight of the system).

  3. PK says:

    NASA has become a bureaucracy focused more and more on budget politics and less and less on human space flight. Most experienced NASA people know that the budget is nibbled to death by earmarks and other fences built in Congress but accepted by NASA to direct money to places like Glenn (Cleveland) and Ames (Sunnyvale, CA) in return for votes. Langley (Virginia), is another center that is on the fringe of space flight, not the future. As a result, the $ available at Kennedy, Johnson, and Marshall aren’t there to perform the core space flight mission so programs drag, and enthusiasm flags.

  4. Lab-Handler says:

    Luckily we have the tremendous positive impact on space exploration that the middle eastern muslim countries gave us. We might have brought back rocks from the moon, but not until after they threw rocks at the moon.

  5. BarksintheCountry says:

    “politics wouldn’t let us do that”? Kraft concludes with the observation, common to most interested observers, that NASA has become a jobs and pork bureaucracy rather than an exciting agency with a challenging mission.

  6. Justin Kugler says:

    Thank you for publishing this interview, Eric. Our community has had difficulty speaking truth to power.

  7. Alex says:

    The truth needs to be told. Some NASA peeps will be happy to praise the current administration because they benefit from it. But why can’t NASA do something worthwhile where ALL mankind can benefit?

  8. Brian says:


    I have no problem believing this. What astronaut is going to want to spend months locked in a floating can stuck in low earth orbit? Very uninspiring. The occupation was once about exporing extreme environments. Cutting edge discovery and new technology. Now we tell them, they get to spend months conducting mundane experiments or housekeeping on the station. I am surprised they can find anyone willing to join the astronaut corps.

    • Justin Kugler says:

      I think that has more to do with NASA’s tendency to select military aviators. Astronauts like Don Pettit made the most of their time at the Station and loved being there.

    • ModerateChuck says:

      A big part of any reluctance has to be requirement to spend many months in Russia – the astronauts have families in many cases. And for many of them, learning Russian is a distraction from their goals for becoming an astronaut – research in their field. All time spent learning to do the same things but in a different language is time taken away from their specialty, and they were picked largely because of their accomplishments in their specialty. None of them were picked because they were linguists.

  9. ModerateChuck says:

    One point that cannot be discussed enough is the way that Congress uses all Federal programs as a construction project to bring jobs to their district – leading (for NASA) to excess “centers” being created and money dispersed. The best example is the Independent Verification and Validation facility in West Virginia. Any effort like that must be done at the Centers where work is actually done – KSC, MSFC, JSC in particular.

    NASA needs to close that facility in particular and shift the work to the other Centers. That is just an example of course, there is other reorganization that needs to be done.

    But once a program or facility is opened it is extremely tough to ever close it.

    • PK says:

      The IV&V is in West Virgina like so much Federal pork: becasue of Robert Byrd, Senior Senator and pork barrel master.

    • IANVS says:


      re: “The IV&V is in West Virgina …”

      What you call federal pork, the
      Report of the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident, in compliance with Executive Order 12546 of February 3, 1986, calls “[serving] the best interests of the nation in restoring the United States space program to its preeminent position in the world.”

      btw, who was the POTUS when that executive order was issued in 1986?

      or when “NASA’s IV&V Program was established in 1993 as part of an Agency-wide strategy to provide the highest achievable levels of safety and cost-effectiveness for mission critical software”?

    • ModerateChuck says:

      I picked on the IV&V but IANVS inadvertently points out another problem with that center – independent verification (closely related to an aviation term Cockpit Resource Management) needs to be built into a system from the foundation. When you take verification and run it from a remote center, it becomes another hoop to jump through. If the program management takes safety, etc seriously it will have effective, independent verification. But can a center and a verification system chase around after programs to implement anything? No.

  10. big c says:

    What NASA really wants is a blank check. Plain and simple.

    • Eric Berger says:

      No. What NASA wants is a clearly defined mission and the resources to accomplish that goal.

    • JohnD says:

      Eric, I would suggest that what NASA wants is a clearly defined mission and the resources to accomplish that goal for long enough to accomplish the goal. No more of this “we’ll fund you in full the first year (when we get great press) and then cut your funding in the following years (when the press has moved on to other stories)”.

  11. Chris Walken says:

    This is to be expected when the president gives a mandate to NASA administrator Charles Bolden to “find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and engineering — science, math and engineering”.

    Really? That is a priority?

    • Eric Berger says:

      The Muslim angle is overblown and among the least of NASA’s problems.

    • Magic Carpet Rider says:

      The fact that the current administration gave the mandate at all indicates it is NOT overblown. The leaders at NASA are afraid to voice their disagreement with the direction of the program…another by-product of the current administration. The agency, like all other federal agencies, has truly become a way to send the pork home without doing anything meaningful. Disband it or set a goal. What we have now is a mess. We don’t even have a viable launch vehicle of our own and have to hitch rides from the Russians, for heaven’s sake… What would Kennedy and Kruschev say about that?

    • Justin Kugler says:

      There was no such mandate. It appears nowhere in the National Space Policy, the 2010 Authorization Act, or the policy guidance NASA gives to the Directorates.

  12. Wasn't My Fault says:

    Best article I’ve read in a while-Thanks Eric and Mr. Kraft!!!!

    I just wish we’d do our own ECONOMICAL rockets and not let Obama and Congress send BILLIONS to Russia while destroying and emaciating our program.

  13. Sgt Dave says:

    They can’t get people who want to go to the ISS because they are astronauts so of course they want to be Buck Rogers. I was a technician with a major telephone company and in the military so that sort of job would have been perfect for somebody like me since I’m not an astronaut anyway. To be up there maintaining things day to day would have made me happier than a pig in slop.

    • Haveagoodday says:

      I agree with Sgt Dave that maintenance tasks on the space station could be preform by someone other than a PHd astronaut. In fact, what would be a good idea is to have maintenance crews that spends 1 month a year (if that works when you factor in radiation) to service the space station, as well as, malfunctioning satellites.

  14. Teus says:

    If NASA doesn’t do exciting things, private companies involved in space flight will do it.

  15. tanstaafl says:

    A big rocket would be useful to go back to the moon and eventually to Mars. The Saturn V cost around $1 billion per launch in today’s dollars, and NASA could launch one every two months. Maybe NASA can’t develop a big rocket any more. (That’s really sad, if true.) But if you consider that SLS could be used for 50-60 years or more (like some of the Soviet designs), I don’t think it’s such a bad idea, assuming that the NASA budget grows to something like $30 billion/year and America really commits to manned exploration of space again. But I’m not holding my breath; Americans are just not into science or space exploration.

  16. Old Dispatcher says:

    Being elderly myself I can easily see the wisdom in heeding the advice of your elders, but I can also say that if oil companies were still doing things the way we did when I first started the world would have run out of oil long ago.

    The problem with new technology is that you have to try it before you know if it will work. About 95% of what we tried in our labs went nowhere, but that 5% that did reshaped the business.

    I learned about 30 years ago that the new guys wanted to hear more about our failures than our successes because there was more to be learned from them. And politics drives some NASA decisions? If you think the government is bad try working for a major-major oil company.

    We went with the theory that it was best to try something and plan for it to work, and if it did not then we knew what would not work. But the worst possible approach to a problem is to do nothing, and doing things the way you have always done them is almost as bad as doing nothing.

  17. Scott says:

    For the tiny slice of the federal budget pie NASA requests to carry out its mission, we get such a benefit to our country. New technologies come out of NASA’s work. Our youth are inspired to engage in science and engineering. Our public’s imagination is nurtured by the exploration of new places through the direct and indirect actions of NASA’s astronauts and scientists. Our nation earns prestige for our innovation. We should have been back to the Moon already, and we should have our bootprints on Mars by now. It’s a shame that we spend so much taxpayer money on wasteful projects, and those that benefit sociey’s lazy and unproductive. A little goes a long way with NASA, and we should be happy to spend it. I wonder what my children will have to look forward to? It doesn’t appear that manned launches to deep space are in the cards… and maybe not even launches into boring old Earth orbit.

  18. Hank Jones says:

    Thanks for this interview. The foolishness of the SLS seems to be obvious to everyone except congress. I think you can make good arguments for all three missions, moon, Mars, asteroid, but if we intend to be in space long term and make use of what we find there I think lunar is by far the most compelling. JSC continues to hemorrhage talent as projects wind down with nothing to replace them, going on two years now. We have no budget, no agreed upon mission, and little hope for change.

  19. Ray S says:

    I do believe that NASA is severely underfunded and I was excited for SLS, but it just isn’t feasible. NASA needs to hand things off to the private industry. I can’t think of anything for the current direction of NASA that would be beneficial while cost effective.

  20. bkbirge says:

    Thanks for publishing this important interview. Here’s hoping more people listen.

  21. blogger361 says:

    Eric – please, please do a similar interview with Gene Kranz. That guy is one tough son of a gun. I can guarantee he will hold nothing back!

  22. supermonkey says:

    I’m not sure I agree with Kraft’s position that nobody wants to fly to the ISS. I imagine there are plenty of researchers who would love to spend six months on ISS performing the boring, routine every day science that nobody thinks is interesting but is nonetheless valuable.

  23. Art Vandeley says:

    What is this NASA people talk about from time to time? Signed: Barack Obama.
    If he can’t tax it or morally change it’s direction, he wants nothing to do with it.

  24. Lakelady says:

    Thank you, Eric. And thank you Mr. Kraft. The president has NASA under his thumb. And he has a hard time admitting when he is wrong and changing direction. Mr. Bolden is not strong enough to buck him. LET’S GO TO THE MOON AND BUILD THOSE SOLAR PANELS!!!

    • Justin Kugler says:

      The President actually tried to dramatically change the direction of the space program towards the technology development that Kraft advocates. It was Congress that hunkered down and insisted that NASA had to be responsible for building its own rockets and capsules. Unfortunately, the President agreed to the compromise law that gave Congress what they wanted, instead of fighting harder for the needed changes.

  25. Ed C says:

    The only way those eight Astronauts are going beyond orbit is if they join the private sector, Space X.

  26. dt says:

    But you guys wanted to blame President Obama now what?

  27. AFVet says:

    Straight talk from a straight shooter. Given this administration’s propensity to play petty games with dissenters (see: JSC being denied a decommissioned shuttle), one hopes they don’t rename the “Christopher Kraft Mission Control Center”.

    • Justin Kugler says:

      Space Center Houston didn’t get an Orbiter because their proposal was sub-standard and they didn’t raise any money to host it. The only rubric under which SCH got an Orbiter was if the NASA evaluation committee weighted proximity to a NASA center over all other considerations.

    • AFVet says:

      You and Charles Bolden keep telling yourselves that, Justin. Curiously enough, former astronauts, JSC & NASA administrators, technicians & staff vehemently disagree with you – I’m going with them.

      Of course, sticking a shuttle on the deck of a defunct aircraft carrier in New York without regard for hurricanes that ‘never’ strike the east coast (ala Sandy) was a brilliant proposal!

    • Justin Kugler says:

      That “defunct aircraft carrier” gets more visitors than SCH does. I saw the proposal with my own two eyes and was not impressed.

      Not that this would be the first time I disagreed with others in my field. Introspection is usually one of the first things to go when people encounter cognitive dissonance. Houston believed it deserved an Orbiter so much that it seems no one thought we would have to do any real work to display one.

  28. Jefff says:

    Kraft is a mission commander. He doesn’t want NASA to go anywhere that a mission commander on the ground can’t manage minute-by-minute. If we go even to an asteroid, the communcations time lag is too long, and the mission will actually have to be run from the spacecraft. This is intolerable to any NASA manager. You may remember from “The Right Stuff” that they didn’t want the astronauts to even have a window, much less the opportunity to provide live control inputs. That attitude is still in place today. The shuttle was run 99.9% by autopilot. Even today, ground control “flies” the ISS minute by minute. They don’t do a single thing without first getting approval from mission control.

    A moon base can still be operated from the ground; we proved this with all the Apollo missions. It will make a lot of people feel good but it’s not going to advance our ability to get to Mars any more than the ISS does already.

  29. StanleyS says:

    Good article, Eric.

  30. Robert Clark says:

    What’s even sadder is that we could go back to the Moon if NASA would let go if that fixation that any return to the Moon has to look like Constellation.
    Simply using a lander the size of the Apollo lander or smaller would mean a lunar mission we could do with a single launch of the Falcon Heavy or two of the Delta IV Heavy.

    Bob Clark

    • Hank Jones says:

      We could do the whole Apollo avionics on an iPhone these days. String 5 of them in parallel and you’ve got a hard redundant system. We don’t need to fill every nook and cranny with beyond state of the art electronics to get back to the moon. Unfortunately I doubt that NASA’s current safety protocols would let Apollo fly today.

  31. Hop David says:

    I’m delighted to see Kraft endorse the idea of propellant depots and slam SLS.

    The Obama administration had proposed some big changes. Giving the new kids (SpaceX, etc.) more action. R&D on orbital propellant storage and transfer. developing robotics.

    A lot of those were gutted by pork barrel politicians (mostly Republican but some Democrats) in favor of resurrecting HLV in the form of SLS.

    I am also happy to Kraft advocate going back to the moon.

  32. Ralph W says:

    NASA, for quite a number of years, has been destroyed by politics and political correctness. That is both internally and externally. Just what did we accomplish with the shuttle program that could not have been done here on terra firma for less money, other than the Hubble? Originally we had a goal, go to the moon. The public supported that idea. For some reason, the public figured that if we beat the Russians to the moon, we were somewhat safer. The moon race had a lot of similarities to a big sporting event, a clearly defined & achievable goal, excitement, a dreaded competitor, and a fan base united in support of acheiving a clear victory. We were all proud when we got to the moon. All that has been missing ever since. And, in the meantime, our collective attention span has shortned. The public is divided in what we define as the role of government. The bunch in Washington, of every stripe, has fed that problem. Yes, there has been talk of sending a crew to Mars. But that is not realistic at this moment & out public attention span is too short and divided for a long term focus.

  33. houstonbeachgirl says:

    Love Gene Krantz. Now that would be a good interview!

  34. Bubba rydel says:

    instead of bombing a foreign country. instead of acting as the world’s mercenary army. we should take this money and fund NASA. We should build our own space station. We should build new and improved shuttles. We should stand up and order OUR government to put these actions into affect immediately.

  35. Curtis Quickc says:

    NASA should be all about exploring the solar system, but NASA should not be building any rockets any more. IF NASA keeps building rockets, we will never go ANYWHERE! There is simply not enough money to build rockets AND explore. NASA should instead be spending the lion’s share of their budget on exploration (i.e. on re-usable spacecraft like the Nautilis)and use the smaller portion of it’s budget to purchase the means to get there from private industry. Soon Americans will be flying in space on American rockets and in American spacecraft. The irony is that these rockets and spacecraft will not be designed or controlled by NASA.

    SLS will be the death of NASA if it is not cancelled. If SLS survives to completion NASA will have become a one-trick SLS pony as all its resources will have had to be re-directed to building the SLS. And then if the SLS is completed there will be no money left to fly it or to build any payloads to lunch from it.

    The longer SLS continues, and it looks to be missing its milestones pretty regularly these days, the more marginalized NASA will become. Commercial space will be doing all the cool stuff while everyone sees NASA spinning its wheels never finishing its expensive shiny new rocket based on four-decade-old technology.

    The SLS may never fly, but that is hardly a problem, as it’s supporters in Congress care not a whit about launching anything on the SLS. They just want to keep the pork flowing as long as possible to their constituents. They don’t care that NASA is being starved by the hungry SLS.

    The only possible way out of this mess could come after Falcon Heavy flies next year and SpaceX announces upgrades to it’s second stage engine allowing the Falcon Heavy to lift over 70mt. When this happens there will be no need for the SLS. Support for the SLS would be untenable and it might then be cancelled. Only this could save NASA and the American space program. But I’m not holding my breath.

    • JohnD says:


      That would be nice, but the history of the Conestoga rocket (and MIR, inc) suggests that instead Congress and NASA will work to reduce their competition instead of embracing it.

  36. Thomas Fenske says:

    Great interview. NASA is an organization trying to find a purpose. Oh, the real purpose is obvious, but deep down their purpose is to get funding and they think the only way to get funding is to showboat. That’s the difference between the proposed asteroid mission and a comprehensive lunar exploration program. Going to an asteroid is a showboat … throw a lot of $$ in a one-shot deal. Lunar exploration is long term and it is boring. Been there done that. I think the president essentially said that. But the rewards in the latter, for all humanity, are almost endless and we have literally barely scratched the surface. Sheesh.

  37. Ron Hooper says:

    Been a fan of NASA since it’s inception and really wanted to see us get to Mars in my lifetime. But the NASA manned program is dead, NASA just doesn’t know it yet.

    The Bush Administration started the Constellation program and never funded it properly. This caused NASA to raid other programs to try to meed the directive. The result a project that was overrun and behind schedule. Obama cancels it, wasting all that was already spent to go to an asteroid (a joke), again without the proper funding or support in congress. The next president will surely cancel it since as the article shows it will be overrun and behind schedule again wasting all that was already spent. The next president will come up with another plan, maybe the one proposed here to go back to the moon, or something else but as before, there will be insufficient funding causing another cycle of wasted money and opportunity.

    Meanwhile the public sees all the waste and wants it stopped (rightly so) causing less and less chance to get any funding for anything. Trying to get the private sector to do space exploration is a bit of a joke. Corporations jump in as long as there is funding from NASA but until there is a viable profit motive the minute NASA stops funding they will bail.

    There are only two hopes on the horizon. First, when China gets to the moon maybe enough people will ask, what happened to NASA and want to do something about it. It may stir the public and the incompetents in congress to do something about it but just like the moon race it will be for the wrong reason. The right reason is for exploration itself not to beat someone. Or second, if Dennis Tito pulls off his flyby of Mars in 2018 ( a long shot) there may be enough public response to get back in the game.

    It is all just so sad.

    • Eric Berger says:

      I agree with most of this. What I disagree with is that the public sees NASA as a waste. It does not. The space agency has overwhelmingly positive ratings among the public. Unfortunately I don’t think the public realizes what a dire situation the human spaceflight program is in.

    • JohnD says:


      Two points:

      1) Obama wasn’t the first president to radically change the direction of NASA; indeed, that has become something of a tradition in DC. Nixon killed Apollo to fund the shuttle. Carter tried to kill the shuttle. Reagan stopped shuttle production in order to fund Space Station Freedom. Bush41 killed the station to go to Mars. Clinton killed Mars to build the ISS and the shuttle’s replacement. And Bush43 killed the shuttle’s replacement and tried to kill the ISS to pay for Constellation.

      2) Going to an asteroid is not a joke. There are many good scientific reasons to want to go to an asteroid; for one, they tell us more about the early Solar System than the Moon or Mars will. And there are many economic reasons to want to go to an asteroid; ask Planetary Resources if you doubt me.

      The right space exploration plan would be “all of the above” – bases on Moon and Mars and trips to near Earth asteroids with probes to those places we can’t go (e.g., Europa). But, given that we can’t even get Congress to pay for any single one of those goals, “all of the above” simply isn’t going to happen.

    • Ron Hooper says:

      Didn’t mean to imply that the public sees NASA itself as a waste, just that they do see canceled programs and constant changes in direction as a waste. That said, NASA hasn’t done the best job in keeping the public excited. Yes, successes like Curiosity get attention but they are woefully unaware of the many other achievements.

  38. Hi Eric,

    Please check out this article and the sizzle taking place at NASA thanks to the joint partnership with the Houston Technology Center:

  39. elFaro says:

    The man is spot on- and he should know. Come on, NASA, show some brass!

  40. Ralph W says:

    Eric, You posted, “The space agency has overwhelmingly positive ratings among the public.”
    I do not think the public is delighted with what is going on at NASA, but rightly, at least to a large part, put the blame on Washington. The general public trust NASA much more than they trust Washington.

  41. Joe Robinson says:

    An agency that ran off von Braun and let Skylab burn up has tipped its hand as to what its all about. Its all about money, power, and politics. Not about exploration. That was a long time ago that the agency went adrift and yet people didn’t seem to notice. I was a little kid asking, “why did they let Skylab burn up?” As an adult I got the inside scoop. With Skylab up there congress would never approve untold billions on a new space station.

  42. Matthew Neuls says:

    Thank you for publishing this article, I wholeheartedly agree with Chris Kraft’s insight. Let’s go back to the moon, let the robotics industry focus on Mars!!

  43. Mark Poulin says:

    SLS is pork barrel poltics gone completely overboard…Human rate the Delta IV Heavy.