That is not the point that the article is making. The evaluation criteria for the potential missions favours missions that increase NASA's headcount over missions that, y'know, actually do stuff in space.

NASA has done some very impressive stuff it's true. But if you consider that it went from a standing start in 1958 to moon landing 11 years later, it ought to have done a lot more in the 40 years since then.

The moon landing was pushed by Cold War politics (and funding). Those projects take huge amounts of money, and NASA had them. After that, the interest tapered off.

I don't think that's true. Well, it is true that there is less funding now. But it's also true that in nearly every industry, the overwhelming trend is to do more in absolute terms with less in relative terms. E.g. what percentage of the average person's annual income would it cost for a transatlantic flight in 1969 compared to 2009, and how many people do it? (That will have to be rhetorical for now as I can't find the numbers with a quick Google). Yet in 1969 (50 years after the first non-stop transatlantic flight) transatlantic travel, while expensive, was unremarkable. By now shuttle flights ought not to be an "event" but routine... And the first 747 flew in 1969, now you can buy 'em off the shelf.

There needs to be political will too. There are huge risks involved in taking on monumental projects. What if NASA spent billions of dollars developing a major project that fizzled? If there's no political power behind it, NASA risks losing all of the funding they get in the first place, and definitely not being able to get more to finish what they started. As an organization, it is safer to survive doing lots of small, achievable things, and wait for the day that the world-changing missions are an important political tool again.

The moon landing was all of the following things: a transcendent moment in the history of the human species; a crash program of mostly symbolic importance; undertaken with little thought about how to follow up; fantastically expensive; totally worth it; unsustainable in the long run.

In the years since its Big Funding Crash, NASA has gotten good at robotic exploration, planetary science, launching satellites, and other interplanetary odd jobs that are impressive and important but less epic than the moon landing. They should keep doing what they're good at -- robotic exploration, space science, propulsion technology, etc.

But designing manned spacecraft that are safe and efficient at scale is something they've never really been set up to do. That job should be left to groups of people with the right incentives built into their organizational DNA:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX

Hopefully, they'll have more competition soon.

I don't think that is what this article is talking about. It is discussing an aversion to any decrease in work force. Despite the fact that the option that would have potentially decreased the work force may have produced a more "amazing" result.

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