STAN HONDA/AFP/Getty Images NASA logo on a protective box for a camera near the space shuttle Endeavour.

In June, NASA finished work on a huge construction project here in Mississippi: a $349million laboratory tower, designed to test a new rocket engine in a chamber that mimicked the vacuum of space.

Then NASA did something odd.

As soon as the work was done, it shut the tower down. The project was officially mothballed closed up and left empty without ever being used.

You lock the door, so nobody gets in and hurts themselves, said Daniel Dumbacher, a former NASA official who oversaw the project.

The reason for the shutdown: The new tower called the A-3 test stand was useless. Just as expected. The rocket program it was designed for had been canceled in 2010.

But, at first, cautious NASA bureaucrats didnt want to stop the construction on their own authority. And then Congress at the urging of a senator from Mississippi swooped in and ordered the agency to finish the tower, no matter what.

The result was that NASA spent four more years building something it didnt need. Now, the agency will spend about $700,000 a year to maintain it in disuse.

The empty tower in Mississippi is evidence of a breakdown at NASA, which used to be a glorious symbol of what an American bureaucracy could achieve. In the space race days of the 1960s, the agency was given a clear, galvanizing mission: Reach the moon within the decade. In less than seven, NASA got it done.

Now, NASA has become a symbol of something else: what happens to a big bureaucracy after its sense of mission starts to fade.

Read more from the original source:

How NASA spent $349 million on a useless tower