A Letter

Here’s a letter I’ve just sent off of the local New Orleans rag and my hometown paper.

Two important space-related events will occur this week. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) is scheduled to issue its final report on the Shuttle disaster, and the planet Mars will be closer to Earth than at any time in human history.

The CAIB report is expected to go beyond the proximate cause of the Columbia accident, to highlight managerial and institutional failures within NASA. I believe the primary institutional failing within NASA is its lack of focus — it tries to do too much, with no benchmarks against which to evaluate success or failure. The agency dabbles in many things, but ends up doing little well.

America needs space exploration, not just for technological and scientific benefits but for the sense of progress and the positive view of the future it provides. NASA is presently the custodian of our national space exploration efforts, but is in need of an organizing focus. This week’s planetary opposition suggests such a focus: sending humans to Mars. Congress and the White House should direct NASA to take on this challenge as its long-term goal. This need not require a massive investment, merely the leadership of our elected representatives in deciding how NASA?s funds should be spent.

It touches on all three basic themes outlined in the previous post on this subject. Unfortunately, being limited to 200 words (it’s actually 202 words, but close enough) made it difficult to get the point across as well as I would have liked.

Feel free to use this as the basis of your own letters to the editor, but if you do…PLEASE make an effort to customize it, so that the same “form letter” isn’t showing up in dozens of different papers. Or worse, several times in the same paper.