Although they have thousands of highly dedicated and brilliant people, this tremendous resource is being squandered by an organization that is dysfunctional at its core. How can we claim to be pushing the pace of technology when a 35 year old design eats up such a huge portion of the budget?

How are we advancing the state of the art when NASA is the only reason 20+ year old microchip production lines are still in operation; while the rest of the world has moved on to modern designs requiring 1/1000th the size and power, yet performing 1,000,000 times faster?

Why should it take a billion dollars to design and build a single spacecraft over ten years, when the Ford Motor Company comes out with new car models on a yearly basis, which include GPS navigation, millisecond computerized traction/braking control, solid rockets (in airbags) all designed for a horrendous vibration and contamination environment, while being so robust that the vehicle is fully reusable for thousands of hours of operation?

NASA has lost its edge, lost its focus, and lost its heart. Instead of learning new technologies and performing actual experiments with hardware, most of NASA's best spend their time filling out paperwork and procedures that have at best a dubious impact on the final quality of the product.

Instead of building things and testing them in a lab or test range, most of their energy goes into endless review cycles and rehashing of design minutia with people who are thoroughly convinced that if a part hasn't been used the exact same way for years, then it is magically unfit. They routinely sacrifice innovation to the false god of "heritage".

If automakers had been like minded, they would never have allowed delicate electronics under the hood amid the drastic temperature extremes, soot, solvents, water, and constant vibration and shock.

But yet hundreds of millions of cars use state of the art commercial and industrial parts while NASA largely restricts itself to obscure S-class parts in a misguided quest for mythical quality improvements.

This is just one example where the desire for safety above all and a striving for a "perfect" experiment have compounded over the decades to create a space transportation system which is years out of date and hopelessly complex with interlocking redundancy.

It takes a huge standing army to service, inspect, and above all, perform paperwork on. All of which is mere noise and bluster in the face of the proven KISS principle, combined with a willingness to actually build, test and break things.

Unfortunately, NASA's response for decades to any public failure has been to retreat further behind the walls of procedure and analysis, and additional levels of review, oversight and redundancy.

NASA will require true courage to take the next steps to transform itself into the dynamic, effective, and truly awe inspiring organization it has the potential to be.

First, the agency must acknowledge that it has serious, fundamental flaws. It must commit wholeheartedly to purging the culture of the safety/quality myth and mindless faith in heritage and ancient procedures.

You cannot learn, grow and innovate without taking risks and being allowed to fail. Failures teach. Small experimental steps yield actual knowledge as opposed to endless checks and signatures and verification and validation procedures which do nothing more than confirm what you already know.

The true value is in simply trying the true experiment where the outcome is unknown. Failure is and must be an option. The culture must be changed to allow these lessons and others from modern technology to be learned.

The contrast between NASA and an a commercial high tech environment is staggering. While Sony produces portable devices to store Gigabytes of data for years, flagship spacecraft are still operating with devices akin to 8 track cassettes.

For an agency that spurred the rise of modern computing two decades ago, they are remarkably unwilling to take advantage of the power encompassed by the current grandchildren of those devices.

Change will only come with one of two things: either a complete replacement of the upper administration with a team of outside commercial managers who are fully empowered to force a culture change, or a complete obsolescence effected by a burgeoning field of entrepreneurs and international competitors.

NASA is already losing this race. Once its stranglehold on space is fully broken and public consensus reaches a critical level, the politicians will turn on their creation and be forced to either scrap it entirely or truly reinvent it to become competitive and effective again.

The time to rally for this change is now, while the agency's strengths can still be harnessed and refocused, before the culture completely stifles the remaining sparks of creativity and innovation from its membership and before further lives and tens of billions of dollars are wasted.

Terrance Yee is a former small business owner who has worked on several small satellites and launch vehicles including serving as the former Chief Engineer for the recently launched CHIPSat.

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