The Gorgon Knot of Modern NASA Bureaucracy

By Cameron Hills

Source:  Dark Side of the Jam: A NASA game jam postmortem by Brandon Sheffield March 14, 2013.

            Wow!  Someone actually got someone to authorize something at NASA.  A recently organized game jam at the NASA Ames campus had some good points and bad points.  The one that needs fixing is the bureaucracy of this ossified agency.

            The whole point of a bureaucracy is to avoid responsibility and put up roadblocks to progress.  Sure, safety is important.  But when you spend billions to avoid all possibility of danger in a project that should only cost $60 million (Economist,) you know something is wrong.

            There are any number of reasons we should be in space.  Exploration of resources.  Defense from world killing asteroids and comets.  Simple exploration to find something new.  But in today’s economy we need more bang for our buck (well, our US cousin’s buck, but let’s not get picky.)  When Forbes and The Economist agree, you know there is a problem.  The challenge is to cut the knot without cutting the actual good the agency does and without radically making exploration more dangerous.

            Still, kudos to Night Rover Challenge in getting their game jam approved and completed.  I look forward to playing some of these new games.