Sunday February 5, 2012

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Today's Commentary: By Lou Guzzo Errant, Bloated, and Costly N.A.S.A. Should Be Privatized Like one of its errant missiles, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been drifting in space and needs an immediate correction before more billions are wasted. Frankly, I believe N.A,S.A. should be phased out and privatized so that the private sector can compete for space programs and bring our journey into space down to earth, so to speak. The space agency is hopelessly weighed down by a bloated bureaucracy that is more interested in winning bigger budgets than conquering space. How many more gigantic and costly snafus do we have to suffer before we scrap N.A.S.A.? From the tragic Challenger on, the record has been horrendous --- shuttles that leaked fuel, expensive launch delays, the unworkable antenna on the Jupiter-bound space craft, and the $2 billion Hubble telescope with the faulty mirror. But worst of all is N.A.S.A.’s policy of spending billions of dollars to put people into space when it could learn just as much, if not more, by putting far less expensive but more efficient instruments out there --- and not risk the lives of more astronauts. The space program needs the competition private industry can give, with far better results for a lot less money and fewer mistakes. * * * Names, Feats of Space Trailblazers Must Never Be Forgotten For no reason at all --- except that I do it often --- I took Benet’s “Reader’s Encyclopedia” from a book shelf in my study the other night and leafed through it. It has thousands of brief biographies of the people who have shaped history. All the heroes and heroines are there, including the great explorers, who risked their lives to improve the human condition. Columbus, Magellan, DeSoto, Balboa, Scott, Boone, Carson, the Wright brothers, Byrd, Earhart, Lindbergh, Glenn, and so many more. The book opened and my eye found the name of Lindbergh, Charles A. He had risked his life to fly the crude single-engine Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic, the first person to do so. It was an extraordinary feat and it signaled the real beginning of long-distance flight. But then I thought of all the unknown heroes, who gave their lives to blaze trails in the sky. Before Lindbergh, scores of flyers in rickety aircraft gave their lives to pave the way for Lindbergh and Glenn and modern heroes. Without their trail blazing, the conquest of the skies and now space could not have happened. I think that’s the way we should think of and remember, for example, the magnificent seven of the ill-fated Challenger Because their mission will help chart the avenues of space, history must not forget their names: Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Michael Smith, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. For them and all other unsung heroes of history, I think F. Scott Fitzgerald’s brief epitaph is specially appropriate: “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.”

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