A failed cuture at NASA

Yesterday's WSJ contained an opinion article (subscription required) by Homer Hickam, a retired NASA engineer. He argues that many NASA engineers have been asking to retire the space shuttle for well over a decade. Yet anytime the suggestion is made, they are told to get behind the shuttle program. He goes on to say:
I love the astronauts, too. They're brave and they're smart and some of them are even my friends. Some are even engineers. But there are too many of them (around 100, an awful lot for a program that has flown but once in the past two years) and they are mostly acolytes of the space shuttle. If the shuttles were retired, most astronauts would be very much out on a bureaucratic limb, their training obsolete, their chances of getting into space again, or for the first time, much reduced. Bear that in mind the next time you hear an astronaut support the shuttle even though the U.S. is presently fourth in the ability to put humans reliably into space, behind Russia, China, and Burt Rutan.

So let's put the shuttles on the shelf right away and give engineers the gift of designing and building new ships to carry humans into space. These are already on the drawing boards and I believe NASA Administrator Mike Griffin (an engineer) is itching to make them a reality.

It isn't the first time, and likely will not be the last, that two divisions (in this case the engineers and NASA management) within an organization have different visions for the future. A requirement of servant-leaders is that they be willing to sit down and genuinely dialogue over disagreements. Of course, politics and federal funding play a large role in the future of NASA, which makes it even more difficult to accomplish this. But if Hickam is even close to being accurate in his description of the culture of NASA, the American people and those Americans who have dedicated, as well as sacrificed, their lives for advancing space flight, deserve nothing but the best from our space program.