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Speaking of “mules”, the Huntsville Times has a story on disused NASA facilities.

The author could have — but didn’t — mentioned the remaining Saturn V stages, all but one shipset of which are displayed outdoors. The final flight-article first stage (S-IC-15) sits corroding in front of the Michoud Assembly Facility here in New Orleans (and is still, despite never having been painted in 25 years of outdoor display, in better shape than the S-I-C on display at JSC in Houston). Nor did he mention the two complete, flight-article LEMs which were dumped in a Florida junkyard after Apollo wound down.

He points out that it is “good stewardship” to spend scarce maintenance money on other, in-use facilities first, but misses the point that these one-of-a-kind facilities should themselves be in-use. Some disused NASA legacy facilities could — should — be made available to private sector companies. It’s a shame to let such monuments rust away, but it’s even more of a shame to let valuable facilities become monuments in the first place.

But this is a perfect example of what happens when you have “mule” programs — facilities are built, hardware is assembled, an infrastructure is developed, and when it is all over, rather than building on what has been accomplished, it is thrown away and the next mule project is begun from scratch. The resources are squandered, the lessons are lost, the people disperse, and new money is thrown after the old to build new facilities and designs and infrastructure which will themselves, in turn, be abandoned.