Jeff Foust at The Space Review wonders whether the vision is losing focus:

If NASA is truly misinterpreting the intentions of the President -- and one must keep in mind that these comments were made at a a conference of Moon, not Mars, advocates -- the question is why? Is this part of the bureaucratic inertia linked with the difficulty in changing the course of a large agency in a short period of time? Or, is there a deliberate effort by people within NASA, either its top leadership or mid-level managers, to reshape the vision into something they find more palatable?

Spudis thinks that NASA officials are deliberately misrepresenting the vision. "My point is not that they misunderstand it, but that they are misrepresenting it," he said. "This is all done deliberately, and the agenda is to kill this, or to morph it into something that it was never intended to be."

Unfortunately, after raising the possibility that some within NASA are trying to derail the VSE or change it into something else, Foust doesn't address in depth why they are doing so, nor what they might hope to change it into.

Some examples of how NASA's top leadership and/or mid-level managers are working against the VSE would no doubt make for an interesting "Part II" companion article.

Posted by T.L. James on July 26, 2004 10:38 PM