What NASA Needs to Soar Once Again

Re “NASA Needs a New Mission,” editorial, July 3: Once again, your editorials are emphasizing the Luddite approach to spaceflight. You forget that NASA is structuring a program that will find the balance between human and robotic space exploration.

The incentive of prizes to encourage [privately funded spaceflight] ought to be encouraged. In aviation’s early days such prizes were given by newspapers, wealthy individuals and aeronautics clubs. NASA should encourage similar efforts today by the contemporaries of those organizations and concentrate on returning the space shuttle to flight as soon as it is safe to do so. The International Space Station should be finished, and the experience in long-term spaceflight gained from the ISS will serve NASA and international partners well in the next human spaceflight endeavor: the return to the moon and a human landing on Mars.

Your editorial neglects the idea that the first person to step on Mars has probably already been born, and does a disservice to the astronaut corps, the crews of Apollo I, Challenger and Columbia, and the young people who wish to be astronauts.

Matt Wiser

Auberry, Calif.

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NASA does need a new mission, but not the one you advocate. Having worked closely with many NASA centers over the years (going back to the late 1960s), I can assure you that NASA has tremendous resources and excellent technical capabilities. The key question is what is the best way for the U.S. to utilize that resource. Certainly space exploration as you suggest should continue, but I would opt for, say, half of the resources to be focused on helping our nation create new jobs via development of new and improved products. (Already I see foreign countries beginning to move boldly forward and they may soon surpass us in such endeavors.)

In my Composites & Adhesives newsletter, I have advocated this concept. And, yes, recasting some of the NASA centers into federally contracted research and development centers -- such as the Aerospace Corp. (from which I retired in 1991) -- would be a positive step in that regard.

George Epstein

Los Angeles