[FPSPACE] Neil Armstrong's letter in the WSJ

[MattWriter at aol.com]

Neil Armstrong had a letter in the Wall Street Journal for 27 Dec 08   in 
which he voiced optimism for the future of NASA.   I can't link to the individual 
letter, only to the page, and can't reprint it for copyright reasons, so I 
will have to offer a digest of it.   
http://online.wsj.com/public/page/letters.html

His message to the incoming national leadership can be summarized as "You're 
not engineers: make the policy decisions and let the NASA folks work out the 
right path." He thought the transition team members "are neither aerospace 
engineers nor former program managers and cannot be sufficiently knowledgeable to 
make choices in the technical arena." He felt the agency, despite the 
constraints of finance, had the needed talent to succeed, and had developed a workable 
path to the Moon and Mars that should not be interfered with.

COMMENT: Armstrong's basic point - that political leaders should not try to 
be the engineers - is a good one, and I hope his letter will have some impact 
there.   It would have been nice, given public pronouncements from Armstrong 
are guaranteed a wide readership, if he'd added that flat or declining NASA 
budgets would not permit the the engineers to pursue any path but the cheapest one 
(which invariably carries a high degree of risk).   I've stated my personal 
opinion before - I hope President Obama will push for the significant increases 
for NASA that Candidate Obama promised, but I am highly skeptical that he 
will.  


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