Reflections on NASA at 50: Pete Worden

I can characterize my experience with NASA, until recently, with a single word: disappointing.

I was a little kid in the '50s, and then in the '60s went to high school and college. That was a pretty exciting time. I was 19 when we landed on the moon and I was just sure that we were all going to get to go.

My dad was a corporate pilot and his best friend was another corporate pilot -- lived two houses away -- and right after the Apollo landing, that movie "2001" came out and it had human missions to Jupiter -- well if you read the book, it had human missions to Saturn. The neighbor pilot asked me, well do you think that's optimistic? I said, "Oh, no, no ... that's very pessimistic. We're going to be much further than that." And he was right and I was wrong.

I think that NASA basically was a gross failure, that at the end of Apollo, we basically really disappointed everybody. I thought we were all going to get to fly in space. Now only a handful of government employees get to fly in space, so I sort of became a NASA critic and felt that the agency really threw away its legacy. Rather than going out into the solar system, we are confined to an orbiting RV.

I wrote a number of papers about how bad this was, I was on a number of studies and I was kind of a consistent, rather obnoxious, critic. In fact I wrote one paper that (former NASA administrator) Dan Goldin really yelled at me on about self-licking ice cream cones. I referred to NASA as a self-licking ice-cream cone: It was all a political jobs program, and so forth.

Now I think that that's hopefully changed. We'll see ... this is our last, best chance and one reason that I came to work for NASA. We now have a pretty close to a stated objective for doing what NASA ought to do and begin the settlement of the solar system. It's probably 50-50 whether it's going to work. There's still an awful lot of bureaucratic inertia, but this is the first time I've had real hope.

That's one reason I decided to come to work for NASA. [NASA administrator] Mike Griffin is an old friend of mine. He was well aware that I was a critic and he said, "Look, now's your chance to help us fix it." So I guess in a nutshell, I'd say maybe we're on our way. I sure hope so.

Simon P. "Pete" Worden, a retired Air Force brigadier general and University of Arizona astronomy professor, is the director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif. The views expressed are the author's alone and do not represent the official position of NASA or the Discovery Channel.

For more reflections on NASA's 50th anniversary, visit Discovery Space's NASA at 50 page and the When We Left Earth site's official NASA at 50 blog.

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