Today’s New York Times has an article about cumulative effects of outsourcing and privatization on NASA.

As usual, all the assumptions are there: NASA is a science and technology agency, we need to have a centralized government agency for space science, we’re losing our nobility of purpose, bla bla bla.

These folks remain stuck in the 1950s.

In a fairly accurate take, over at the Space Policy Digest BBS, Paul Spudis writes:

Here’s a summary in 50 words or less…

NASA used to be great, but now it sucks because it uses nothing but contractors. However, JPL, alone among the centers, is God’s Gift to Humanity and only screws up when it uses contractors. Eliminate human space flight and give OSS a trillion dollars a year.

There you go. The whole essence in less than 50 words. Saved you a bunch of time and effort.

OSS is Office of Space Science.

Yes, NASA has lost a lot of technical capability, and its work force is aging, but that’s not so much because it uses contractors, as the fact that it’s not doing much that’s technically challenging, exciting or useful. It can’t compete with computer graphics and the internet, or nanotech, or the technologies that people perceive as actually being relevant to their lives, as long as it stays stuck in the mode of spending billions of dollars to send a few government employees into orbit a few times a year.

And the authors of this piece have nothing to say about that problem.