NASA Missions

View 695 Monday, October 03, 2011

The latest Presidential flap is just that, much ado about not very much, but perhaps it ought to be a matter of concern. The concern is not whether Rick Perry and his father were insufficiently zealous in obliterating the word “Niggerhead” on a rock outside a hunting site they leased rights to in 1983, but that any serious person would think that this is relevant to his qualification to be President of the United States. Note that it is not alleged that Perry had anti-black sentiments, then or now. He hadn’t joined the Klan or expressed pro-Klan sentiments. He wasn’t the last Kleagle. He or his father painted over the word “Niggerhead” but apparently they weren’t diligent enough in applying the paint.

And that disqualifies him from being President of the United States. It rates pages and pages of print space.

Disturbing. Not the “Niggerhead” label which was I am sure offensive and is now long gone, but that anyone cares about a faded nameplace from a long time ago.

When I was a kid we used to say things like “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never harm me,” an appropriate answer to someone calling you names (and which generally discouraged them from doing it in the first place). Now, apparently, it is more outrageous to have once hunted on property given the name Niggerhead than to – what? Denounce female circumcision (thus insulting cultures that practice it)? Imply that Scots are miserly? Imply that some other group is stingy? Doubt AGW? Wish bad cess to someone of a different political party? Ah well.

Mission for NASA: Become the national Space Prize organization. Congress appropriates $2 billion a year, relatively trivial amounts; NASA sets up prize committees, stores up the money, and gives it away as prizes. It doesn’t fund anything, it doesn’t need large staffs, it needs some bright people to come up with prize objectives and definitions, judges to determine that the prize objectives have been met, and someone to sign the checks for winners. Nothing else.

Now some of the NASA centers may be worth preserving. JPL is one of them, and I am sure there are still some good facilities at Ames. The launch facility at Canaveral needs to be kept operational. It may even be that some NASA research should be funded directly. X Projects still make sense. But for the most part NASA should operate as NACA did, not as an operational agency.

The US needs a bureau whose task is to show the cost of the other bureaus. Maybe if everyone understood what government costs there would be less of it?