3/31/2009 PERMALINK
Miffed over Russian space commercialization innovation, NASA goes potty
Ever since Russia adopted the smart Civilization 2.0 innovation of charging tourists for rides to subsidize their space launches, a petulant NASA has been driven potty. Now they are taking potty to the max, by making America's zero gravity toilet and exercise bike on the International Space Station off limits to Russians.... READ

It would be nice if this BBC story were merely an early April Fool's Joke, but sadly, knowing how petulantly peeved NASA's bureaucrats have been since the Russian figured out how to cover most of the costs of their launches with space tourism, it is probably true. With NASA's ridiculously expensive, overly complex and outright dangerous shuttle project floundering. And their efforts at creating a reliable new system, one more like the one the Russians now use, falling ever farther behind schedule and exploding in price. NASA bureaucracy has been acting pretty petulance of late. People of Russia, the American people apologize for NASA's petty potty petulance and encourage you to keep up the good work of actually finding ways of commercializing space.

America once knew how to do this well. By offering airmail subsidies and staying out of their way, NASA's anti-bureaucratic forerunner, helped America's innovators move us from the Wright's kite to commercial jet airlines flying Boeing 707's across the oceans, in less time than NASA has been flailing around trying to move humankind off this planet and out into space. What a thing to have to say, but it could well be that today's NASA bureaucracy is the single greatest impediment to space colonization.

America has moved on from practical innovation stimulation, to building fatally flawed and highly complex bureaucratic systems that are too-big-to-fail. There are however, a few bright spots, even within our bloated government.

Just compare NASA's recent progress with DARPA's Grand Challenge success in producing a bot-driven vehicle. First year, vehicles went nowhere, the best performing bot made it only 7 miles along the course before failing. But the very next year, in 2nd challenge, five bots successfully completed the course and bot-driven vehicles became a reality.

If we dumped NASA and put DARPA in charge of fostering humanity's move into space, in twenty years there might be viable human colonies spread all across the solar system with bots out mining the trillions in minerals from the asteroid belt. But if NASA remains in charge, we are likely to have very little, if anything more, than we have today.