LTE: NASA's Bad Direction; Bogged down

Regarding "Can NASA keep curiosities piqued?" (Page A1, Tuesday), the article bemoans NASA's troubles and the threat of being eclipsed by private-sector companies such as SpaceX. It then goes on to say that "few can dispute that NASA can still do great things." Unfortunately, since the moon landings, NASA has done most everything wrong, with the exception of the Hubble telescope and a small sprinkling of other projects.

Well before the moon program was done, NASA rolled the dice on what was arguably the biggest boondoggle in the history of space exploration: the shuttle program. Only a berserk bureaucracy would think it a good idea to launch a multistory building into space for the mundane purpose of delivering a handful of astronauts or a minuscule payload into low Earth orbit, much less claim - as NASA did in the '70s - that the shuttle would accomplish this for a launch cost of $100 per pound.

As we now know, they miscalculated by several orders of magnitude, with a single shuttle launch costing well over $1 billion. It was decisions like this that destroyed the American space program, killed dozens of Curiosity-style programs and delayed by decades the innovation of companies like SpaceX.

Pete Smith, Cypress

http://www.chron.com/default/article/Letters-NASA-the-good-and-the-ugly-3780037.php