JIM BENNETT WRITES:

Rather than a solution to the fulfillment of these needs, the shuttle has become an awkward legacy. It will never deliver the cheap access its proponents had promised, and after Columbia’s loss, lingering doubts will remain regarding the system’s reliability no matter what the result of the investigation may be. Yet it cannot be merely scrapped at this point, without scrapping a substantial range of activities, most notably the International Space Station. . . .

The shuttle’s real problems stem from the system that produced it and managed it from day one. In Lyndon Johnson’s eyes, NASA was primarily the Marshall Plan for the Confederacy. The shuttle was a political creature from the beginning, and the complex set of compromises and tradeoffs needed to bring it into being assured that it would forever be too expensive to fly often enough, or build enough of, to get the proper experience base to really understand reusable space flight. The total number of takeoff-landing cycles flown by the shuttle fleet even now is smaller than that typically flown by a new airliner prototype. In some ways, we still cannot say that anything that has happened with the shuttle fleet is statistically significant. . . .

Government should think less about what the ideal piece of hardware should be, and more about how to help private companies mobilize the capital to develop multiple approaches. Smart buying practices are one such means; permitting capital from close allies like Britain to have a role in financing development might be another.

Read it all. Sorry about all the Shuttle-blogging. I’ll return to my usual hobbyhorses soon enough. . . .