NASA should be doing what they do best-- designing and perfecting the advances in propulsion and systems and spacecraft necessary SPECIFICALLY to perform the missions we set as national priorities, to advance the state of the art. In the sixties NASA had to be at the forefront of EVERYTHING since it was ALL new back then, and EVERYTHING was groundbreaking back then. Times have changed. The FAA and NACA (now NASA) no longer designs airliners, nor the Air Force, Marines, Navy, and Army design the planes, helicopters, and aircraft used in those branches of the military-- they analyze and determine *requirements* that the aircraft has to meet to perform a certain mission, and then have industry come up with bids or designs to fulfill those requirements as needed, then compete their designs while analyzing the competitors designs, infrastructure, facilities, management, and capabilities to ensure that the product can actually be delivered in the necessary numbers and meet the expectations and requirements to fulfill both the need and ultimately the contract. The talents and skills and capabilities to develop launch vehicles (and now manned spacecraft) has passed to industry LONG AGO (more recently with manned spacecraft of course) and so NASA not only inventing but building with select contractors to actually "bend the metal" and put together the NASA designs is both wasteful and duplicative and invariably ends up with an inferior product at greater cost than would be available from commercial providers.

The things NASA does that industry isn't quite there yet, and which NASA does best, is designing things that industry heretofore has had no business model or requirement to build-- mission modules and the support systems necessary to perform deep space missions. Even that sector of manned spaceflight may, in the coming decade, pass to industry as new players like SpaceX and others, wanting to move out into the solar system for various reasons, will HAVE to develop these technologies and capabilities in order to achieve their aims, by necessity. NASA is uniquely positioned, as the only human spaceflight program on Earth to have operated manned vehicles beyond Earth orbit, to spearhead that effort, and the efforts to return to the Moon or explore further out into the solar system beyond, to asteroids, Mars, etc. In short, they should be focusing on building landers, orbital or surface habitats for crews, and support equipment like suits, rovers, power generation, communications, and all the other systems like life support, etc. necessary to sustain a crew and maintain an operational base elsewhere, be it in lunar or lunar Lagrange point halo orbit (gateway) stations, lunar or Mars surface base camps or outposts, or habitat vehicles and systems to transit to and explore or exploit asteroids, or other missions as required (such as servicing deep space telescopes or other infrastructure beyond low Earth orbit...

NASA has NO need to be designing launch vehicles, heavy lift or otherwise, when there is over 60 years of expertise and knowledge base, management, and industry to design and build those vehicles to launch NASA payloads on their next missions of discovery. Otherwise, we get noncompetitive unsustainable bloated kludges like SLS (and Orion basically) while NASA has neglected developing the PAYLOADS necessary to DO ANYTHING with their shiny new rocket once they have it, and have NO MONEY to develop such payloads, because they'll continue to SPEND BILLIONS to maintain even the CAPABILITY to keep building and flying their shiny new SLS in perpetuity while they can only spend the SCRAPS of money left over on actually developing PAYLOADS and MISSIONS that could be launched by that new rocket...

It's crazy but it's how gubmint operated space has worked in the past-- it's an outdated operational model and it needs to change if we're going to accomplish ANYTHING with a national space program-- and if things continue to develop in commercial spaceflight as visionaries like Elon Musk are trying to do and working to accomplish, a national space program may end up being a hopelessly obsolete waste of money in the long term anyway, as they will have frittered away their place at the table along with the billions and decades spent trying to outdo industry in failed attempt after failed attempt while industry and progress has marched on and left them in the dustbin of history...

Later! OL J R

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