The current NASA appropriations struggle highlights a problem with our approach to the challenges of growing a sustainable human spaceflight industry. Using a singular approach centered on NASA missions, our solutions seem much like building ladders to reach a very tall ceiling. Each time we decide to change where we want to go, or what we want to do when we get there, we must start from the ground again and build anew. Worse, our current inability to dismantle one program and start another is creating an untenable situation where we risk spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a spacecraft to nowhere.
