The Houston Chronicle has a great interview with NASA’s “Original Flight Director”, Chris Kraft:

NASA says it’s going places, that its plan to develop a new space capsule and rocket will take human astronauts places they’ve never been before – asteroids and eventually Mars. But many former NASA officials are deeply skeptical about the plan espoused by the space agency, at the direction of the Obama administration. Among the critics is the legendary Chris Kraft, NASA’s first manned spaceflight director, for whom Mission Control at Johnson Space Center is named.

He goes on to talk about the plans (at the time) for NASA’s Space Launch System, a massive undertaking for a huge cargo-lift capability that may not actually be needed *right now*.

And, as those of us who have worked with some of these original NASA heroes know, Chris pulled no punches about the direction of the Agency and how the Administration leadership seems to have failed his beloved NASA.

Another criticism of the SLS plan is that it’s being built as this massive “single-launch” booster system.

What’s so magic about this being able to lift 120 tons? Why can’t you use what you’ve got and put your vehicles into space in pieces, like you did with the space station? That’s the right way to do it.

We have a number of heavy-lift vehicles currently in the launch stable, we have proven on-orbit assembly techniques, and have mastered ground-up rendezvous launch operations. It seems far more manageable to use more of what we have than to completely bust the ever-shrinking budget on a one-off launch vehicle that will have rather limited (large) payload opportunities.

Chris goes on to be bluntly honest about the current direction (or lack thereof) at NASA and why the agency is hemorrhaging some of its best and brightest:

Astronauts want to do something that has some excitement to it. The engineers that come to Johnson Space Center want to do something. You go talk to the guys who were doing Constellation (NASA’s now-scuttled plan to return to the moon), and the reason they came to NASA was to go back to the moon. They’re all leaving now. The leaders are leaving for a lot of other reasons also, but they’re leaving because there’s no future that they want to be involved in. And that’s unfortunate. You’ve got to have a reason for people to give you their lives, which is what I did. I gave NASA my life not because they asked me to, but because I wanted to. I had a reason. But I just don’t think that’s there now.

The bold bit in Chris’s quote above echoes my career at NASA as well.

I was there because I believed in it… I wanted to be a part of something grand.

When I left, NASA was still in the infancy of Space Station planning.  Even though we were at the end of the Mir program when I left, the grand plans for returning to the Moon and pressing on with manned Mars missions were fading rapidly. I feel for my friends still there… they believe, as I do, that we *CAN* do these things and that we *SHOULD* do these things.

Now all we need is the fiscal and concrete support to *DO* those things… and NASA can return to her former glory.

But, until then…