This Houston Chronicle article's title is an understatement: Shuttle promise unfulfilled.

It's a nutshell review of the politics of 1971 that resulted in a partially reusable spaceplane with unwanted and unused capabilities, which was sold on unrealistic cost and utilization promises -- the sordid bureaucratic history of the program with which we are all by now familiar.

But what I found especially interesting was the following:

The 1971 Mathematica study was more intriguing, largely because its crucial finding -- that the shuttles would be self-supporting if lofted into space once a week -- was not believed possible, even by NASA managers. In startling testimony before the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in April, Robert F.Thompson, the space shuttle program manager from 1970 to 1981, bluntly admitted as much.

"Mathematica sat down and attempted to do some work on operating costs, and they discovered something," Thompson said. "Mathematica discovered that the more you flew, the cheaper it got per flight. Fabulous. So they added as many flights as they could. They got up to 40 or 50 flights a year. Hell, anyone reasonable knew you weren't going to fly 50 times a year."

Thompson also admitted that NASA and the White House low-balled the total development cost by $1 billion when presenting it to Congress. NASA was asking for $6.15 billion and promising a first flight by 1981; the Office of Management and Budget drew the line at $5.15 billion and set the deadline at 1979.

Thompson testified that when he questioned NASA comptroller Bill Lilly about the discrepancy, Lilly replied, "Shut up. You got your program. Go on about your business."

Whether the shuttle, once exposed to budget and other restrictions, ever had a chance of being the vehicle imagined two decades earlier by Wernher von Braun, Arthur C. Clarke and other space visionaries is an open question. Probably not. The technological hurdles were greater than they knew, and when total reusability was dropped as too expensive, the concept of the thing was irrevocably altered. There is no shortage of old shuttle hands who feel they were cheated by budget-whackers out of the chance to make a great spaceship.

This seems an odd thing to be bringing up now, thirty-two years later, in front of a committee investigating a Shuttle accident. It sounds like something one would hear before a "reconciliation commission".

Perhaps that is what NASA should be doing now, after the issuance of the CAIB final report: establishing a follow-on commission to investigate NASA top to bottom, beginning to present, and expose the bad decisions (and the good choices) that the agency has made over the years and the impact they have had on civil, military, and commercial space efforts. Granted, this is something more suited to an independent historian or journalist, but a CAIB-like committee with the power to subpoena witnesses, conduct closed-door interviews, and obtain official records and correspondence would undoubtedly get a better collection of data than an individual investigator working on his own initiative. Plus, such a commission would have a higher profile than an individual author, bringing more public attention to the problems thus identified and thereby increasing the likelihood of something being learned from the effort.