One of the stupidest and most criminal results of Constellation’s crowding out the rest of the NASA budget was the dismantling of the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts two years ago. It was only costing a few million dollars a year, and that trivial amount of money, which was providing tremendous bang for the NASA buck, was taken to be poured down the multi-billion-dollar Ares rat hole. Now, apparently, there’s talk of resurrecting it. That would be a small, but vital step in getting the agency back on the right track, if the new administrator follows the advice.
4 thoughts on “Restoring NIAC?”
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If “saving jobs at KSC” is the political cross we just have to bear, I’d be in favor of moving the whole damn Shuttle work force to NIAC. Imagine what they’d do with hundreds of teams and billions of dollars…
The problem with that is the skill/experience mismatch…
Could it be worse than running the Shuttle and/or Constellation?
Sure could be. At least with the Shuttle, you got something that could fly for a few billion a year. Throwing a thousand plus times as much funding at an organization as it has shown it can handle, is a recipe for even worst wasting than the Shuttle in my view.