What If ?

Does the government have anyone on the payroll whose main job is to go around asking, “What if … ?”

Man, I would love a job like that.  It would almost make the Monday morning commute worthwhile.

Take the space shuttle program, for instance.  Obama is looking for things to cut, and space exploration, even of the low-earth-orbit kind, is not high on his Fundamental Transformation list.  Unless you count eliminating it as a fundamental transformation, which he went ahead and did.  No more space shuttle launches.  The final one happened in July of 2011, almost three years ago.

Now, we have a stake in this massive orbiting contraption called the International Space Station.  A quick google tells me US investment in the ISS is to the tune of $75 billion, though this seems understated to me.  Wikipedia quotes some such authority as stating the ISS is the “single most expensive thing ever built.”  The two main ways to bring astronauts to the station were via the Space Shuttle and Russian Soyuz rockets.

Let’s go back in time some couple of years.  I’m simplifying and guessing the timeline, but NASA goes to the President (Bush, most likely, or Obama, and maybe he had the unpleasant task of appeasing Congress) saying, do you want to continue the Space Shuttle missions or move on to develop the next generation in shuttle technology?  Perhaps the demise of the shuttle was put into motion before our current president was sworn into office.  Maybe, though it’s hard to tell as he likes to point blame to his predecessor(s) for bad news.  But still he’s the guy who was at the wheel when the program was allowed to go belly-up.

Did anyone, anywhere, in government ever clear his or her throat and ask a WHAT IF? question at any point in the timeline of the shuttle’s shut down?  Such as

What if the US and Russia wind up on opposite sides of some global conflict?

Yeah?  So?

Well, it seems Russia is responding to our punishing them for the whole Ukraine/Crimea thing via economic sanctions by banning US astronauts from using the Soyuz to go to the International Space Station.

Okay tough guys.  Now what do we do?

I’m serious.  What do we do?

Because I sure as hell would’ve asked a whole bunch of WHAT IF? questions long before we ever got to this one.

[Note: upon further research, quickly and stealthily between workday tasks, I see that in 2004 Bush charged NASA with the next-generation manned space exploration program, and they came up with Project Constellation.  The Shuttle was expected to retire in 2010.  Obama’s 2011 budget, released in February of 2010, contained no funding for Constellation.]