Spaced out
The long journalistic odyssey that began on Feb. 1 with the crash of the space shuttle Columbia ended today. The Columbia Accident Investigation board released its 248-page report, blaming NASA's "culture" for its cavalier attitude toward crew safety for Columbia's doom. The report noted that NASA is underfunded and deadline-driven, and managers don't listen to underlings. In short, it runs just like every other governmental agency.

How about privatizing the entire program? When Boeing or Lockheed designs and builds a passenger jet, engineers oversee engineers, redundant systems back up redundant systems and voila! you have the safest mode of transportation ever invented. With NASA, you have Congressmen overseeing engineers, and corners get cut in order to shave costs and make deadlines.

Let rocket scientists build space shuttles. I'd rather see us spend our money to fix the "culture" in underfunded, deadline-driven and top-down state child-welfare agencies first, then worry about NASA.