I’ve made the point numerous times that we don’t have any shortage of astronauts, and that their loss in accidents like last February’s shouldn’t be the primary focus of our concern in formulating national space policy.

And actually, it’s old news, but the press is now starting to pay attention, because it’s gotten dramatically worse. That is, the problem of NASA having too many astronauts. NASA has always had more astronauts than it needed, and as the article points out, many of them end up being engineers on the Shuttle program.

What the article doesn’t point out is that one of the reasons for the oversupply was that when George Abbey ran Johnson Space Center with an iron fist, he used many of the astronaut corps as a spy network to know who was and wasn’t loyal, and rewarded or punished them by allowing them to fly, or not. If he’d had a shortage, he wouldn’t have had that kind of leverage over them.

Unfortunately, even though the Abbey regime supposedly ended when Bush came in, many in Houston still live in fear of his return, until they actually see his dead body.