An email from Andrew Case informed me of an item that Clark Lindsey over at RLV News found. Homer Hickam (author of Rocket Boys, the book on which the movie October Sky was based) has an op-ed in today’s Journal (subscription required, unfortunately), titled, NASA’s Vietnam.

…when I put emotion aside, I can’t ignore my engineering training. That training and my knowledge as a 20-year veteran of the space agency (and also a Vietnam vet) has led me to conclude that the Space Shuttle is NASA’s Vietnam. A generation of engineers and managers have exhausted themselves trying to make it work and they just can’t. Why not? Because the Shuttle’s engineering design, just as Vietnam’s political design, is inherently flawed.

He thinks that NASA doesn’t have a culture problem, just a lousy vehicle design. He wants to build an OSP and fly it on an expendable. That will make everything all better!

Sorry, Mr. Hickam, with all due respect to your cherished agency, it has both. It has a lousy design partly because of a cultural problem, partly because of a policy problem, but there’s much more to be fixed at the agency, that simply coming up with a different expensive and unsafe way to put people into space isn’t going to solve.

I know that it pains a veteran like you, but we need to fundamentally break the connection in the minds of both the public, and policy makers, between NASA and space. They are not synonymous. It’s time to open up the competition and let some other folks give it a shot.

Besides, I’ve always thought that Space Station Albatross was NASA’s Vietnam, and that we should just declare victory and go home.

[Update at 4 PM PDT]

For those who want to Read The Whole Thing, there’s a slightly longer version of it up at Spaceref now, with a different title–“Not Culture, But Perhaps A Cult.”

[Update on Saturday afternoon]

It occurs to me that this piece, which I wrote last fall, is relevant to this topic.