In his testimony Kranz bemoaned the hit on America's space culture, both at NASA and elsewhere in the Federal Government. The fear of another failure was so powerful that the space shuttle was no longer permitted to remain the sole US launch vehicle for large payloads, which meant the Defense Dept. and corporate satellite users turned elsewhere for launches. The outcome, as Kranz put it, was "... we became our own customers." The culture of fear dramatically changed both America's and NASA's space business model with seriously harmful results. Once you become your own customer, especially if you are your primary or only customer, you have no incentive to improve your product or service. That's bad enough in the private sector, and I lived through this scenario at IBM in the late 1980's and early 1990's when the company's sales, marketing, and administrative departments were required to buy their computing products from IBM's manufacturing divisions. The result: the manufacturing divisions had less incentive to improve their products because they had a large captive market, and thus their ability to compete elsewhere was damaged. Now, imagine what happens at government agencies that don't operate within a profit-centered, ultra-competitive environment that will hurt them badly if they lose sight of their customers. IBM's pain caused real damage to the bottom line and forced the kind of internal changes that typically occur only after some kind of attention-grabbing disaster.... like the loss of a space shuttle. Unfortunately, where IBM's pain helped it become more competitive, NASA's pain occurred within a culture that doesn't need to embrace competition to survive. If a company forgets its customers, it goes under. If a government agency forgets its customers, it too might go under... but probably not. Why? That depends on how you define the customer of a government agency. Forget the traditional definition of the customer being the user of the product or service provided by the agency, because that "customer" doesn't provide the revenue that makes up the agency's operating budget. Congress provides that revenue, so Congress is the customer of that government agency.

Is this the most effective way to explore, settle, and develop the solar system?