Leading:
‘going or proceeding or going in
advance; showing the way’
Managing:
‘the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals’.
Since the end of the
Cold War, US civil spaceflight has not been so much lead as it has been
managed. Multiple attempts to
lead or change or set a new direction of US civil spaceflight over the last
twenty years have failed and what we have witnessed is largely ‘management’
of a course last set in the mid 1980’s.
There are
numerous reasons for this failure to successfully lead, but chief among them
is what Jonathan Rauch called the creep of ‘economic cannibalism and
governmental calcification’ in his work Governments End, Why Washington
Stopped Working.
Time and
resources have hardened the arteries of the US civil spaceflight program and
have added layer upon layer of crust and mass that has increased the
organizational inertia to levels that cannot be over come, even by the
President of the United States.
Today, the US civil spaceflight faces an existential crisis as the end of a
course set long ago whose purpose has largely been forgotten and relevance
has been overtaken by events is looming with no comprehensive alternative
capable of replacing it. Like a
giant frozen statue, US civil
spaceflight is stuck in a pose that threatens to entomb it forever.
Setting a
new direction, actually leading US civil spaceflight, will require small and
strategic stepsmade from within.
No grand gestures, but rather ingenious innovation and experimentation at
the margins of fiscal, technical and political reality… baby steps if you
will.