Edward R. Murrow has rolled over at least a thousand times in his grave since what, ten years ago?

It is NOT fair for NASA to be blamed for things the organization as a whole is not responsible for. That includes wacko employees w/ guns and/or pepper spray, as well as industrial accidents suffered by totally private ventures led by people who regularly attack NASA.

However, the world is not fair. Popular culture enjoys the lowest common denominator, and “temporarily insane” or drunk astronauts are a much easier media story than “NASA’s approach to lunar exploration isn’t affordable/sustainable because of XYZ” or “NASA isn’t doing enough to protect the Earth’s environment by developing technologies with the Air Force to deflect Near Earth Objects” or “Kistler may go under because NASA keeps buying Russian launch services” or .

The fact that NASA isn’t being blamed — or more importantly, punished — for really big space policy/strategy mistakes is also “unfair”, but more to the point it’s tragic.

But mindless nitpicking isn’t justice… it just feeds the institutional defensiveness that makes REAL critical discussion almost impossible.

P.S. Here’s an example of what I mean. 15 years ago a Houston economic development official asked me, as the then-Chairman of the Space Frontier Foundation, how, given that NASA had spent almost a decade, a full $10 billion, and had thousands of people working on SS Freedom, why I thought SFF had any right to criticize the program. My temptation, of course, was to say that the answer was contained in the question (10 years, 10 billion, a huge bureacracy, and NO HARDWARE). But this guy was so worried about the survival of the program that ANY discussion of HOW to get a space station or WHAT KIND of space station was better was just impossible.

Yes … based on all the other things you have written sans smiley face.

More stupidity from Rand Simberg again

“Sunday’s Houston Chronicle (Falling Objects) presented an unbalanced and biased portrayal of NASA and the thousands of people working in our space program whose technological achievements have been a major contributor to the robust economy we enjoy and largely take for granted. I must take this opportunity to correct the misleading and inaccurate information portrayed as fact:…”