This Time Magazine article does agood job showing the problems and issues with NASA:

The problem is that space research in its current form doesn't have a direct commercial driver (its mainly pure research so this is not surprising) so it needs to be funded by hobbyists or universities/governments. Unfortunately it seems to be way too expensive to be funded by anything except governments which means you end up in the nasty position of having a government bureaucracy acting as lead researcher and sole customer.

As everyone should be aware by now bureaucacies are hideously innefficient and terrible at making decisions, they also tend to produce bloated designs - "the elephant is a mouse designed by a government committee" - and are always incentivised to spend all their money rather than look for savings. Richard Feynman's Appendix to the Roger's inquiry on Challenger is, IMO, the classic expose of this. More and more I fear that what we saw over the weekend was a repeat of this institutional stupidity despite the undoubted dedication of the grunts.

Two web links to the appendix are:
http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix.html
http://history.nasa.gov/rogersrep/v2appf.htm

I don't know what the solution is - but I suspect the ideal solution requires a billionaire with a passion for space travel. Anyone know any?

DD