Robert Zubrin is spot on yet again: NASA has become a bureaucratic hulk that has no clear, direct goals ["The Second-best Plan," Commentary,July 21, page 17]. Technologies are developed and lobbied for by set groups and constituencies; the money is spent on the rationale that they might one day be useful if we ever embrace more ambitious goals. If my daily life operated as NASA does now, I might browse swap meets and junk yards to buy any car parts that catch my fancy or whose salesman has a good pitch. I would stack these in my garden shed and under a tarp in my backyard and justify them by saying I might want to go on a longdistance road trip someday; I know how to drive but I have no real plans, no destination. If someone pressed me on it, I would say, "Maybe California in a few years," while I continued to spend most of my money on random bits and pieces. Occasionally I would hire a mechanic to come look at the parts and devise how they might be put together to form a working car, though they don't fit together quite right and the mechanic says it would take about $100,000 in time and effort to make a working car from them. I don't have that kind of money, so the plans would be postponed and I would return to accumulating more random odds and ends with the hope that somehow the next time with a few more parts the outcome will be different.
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