Space: A New Way Forward

摘要

Our space community always seems to be at a crossroads. It's a common theme. And this year is no different. What I think is different today is the nature of the crossroads at which we find ourselves. This year the threat to our community is increasingly multidimensional, and includes customer exhaustion with cost and schedule performance issues, economic and budget pressures that are as dire as any we have seen before, growing concerns about the vulnerability of space systems, and the emergence of even more credible substitutes for historically space-dominated missions. We can't do much to make the budget pressures felt across all of government disappear overnight. But that fact underscores the importance of taking actions in the areas we can address, and in particular, aggressively tackling the cost and scheduling issues that encourage the termination or the paring-back of so many space programs. We all know that there is much that can be improved.