Privatize The Space Program

After years of declining budgets, public apathy, and failed missions, NASA has gotten a big boost from the Bush Administration's recent promises of extravagant missions to permanently settle the moon and eventually explore Mars. No one knows what it would cost, but a similar idea in 1989 was estimated to cost up to $500 billion. Rather than lavishing money on new missions of dubious value, President Bush should consider a truly radical solution for America's moribund space program: privatize it. There is a contradiction at the heart of the space program: space exploration, as the grandest of man's technological advancements, requires the kind of bold innovation possible only to minds left free to pursue the best of their thinking and judgment. Yet by placing the space program under governmental funding, we necessarily place it at the mercy of governmental whim. The results are written all over the past twenty years of NASA's history: the space program is a political animal, marked by shifting, inconsistent, and ill-defined goals. The space shuttle was built and maintained to please clashing constituencies, not to do a clearly defined job for which there was an economic and technical need. The shuttle was to launch satellites for the Department of Defense and private contractors—which could be done more cheaply by lightweight, disposable rockets. It was to carry scientific experiments—which could be done more efficiently by unmanned vehicles. But one "need" came before all technical issues: NASA's political need for showy manned vehicles. The result, as great a technical achievement as it is, was an over-sized, over-complicated, over-budget, overly dangerous vehicle that does everything poorly and nothing well. Indeed, the space shuttle program was supposed to be phased out years ago, but the search for its replacement has been halted, largely because space contractors enjoy collecting on the overpriced shuttle without the expense and bother of researching cheaper alternatives. A private industry could have fired them—but not so in a government project, with home-district congressmen to lobby on their behalf. There is reason to believe that the political nature of the space program may have even been directly responsible for the Columbia disaster. Fox News reported that NASA chose to stick with non-Freon-based foam insulation on the booster rockets, despite evidence that this type of foam causes up to 11 times as much damage to thermal tiles as the older, Freon-based foam. Although NASA was exempted from the restrictions on Freon use, which environmentalists believe causes ozone depletion, and despite the fact that the amount of Freon released by NASA's rockets would have been trivial, the space agency elected to stick with the politically correct foam. It is impossible to integrate the contradictory. To whatever extent an engineer is forced to base his decisions, not on the realities of science but on the arbitrary, unpredictable, and often impossible demands of a politicized system, he is stymied. Yet this politicizing is an unavoidable consequence of governmental control over scientific research and development. Nor would it be difficult to spur the private exploration of space. Phase out government involvement in space exploration, and the free market will work to produce whatever there is demand for, just as it now does with traditional aircraft, both military and civilian. Develop a system of property rights to any stellar body reached and exploited by an American company, and profit-minded business will have the incentive to make it happen. We often hear that the most ambitious projects can only be undertaken by government, but in fact the opposite is true. The more ambitious a project is, the more it demands to be broken into achievable, profit-making steps—and freed from the unavoidable politicizing of government-controlled science. If space development is to be transformed from an expensive national bauble whose central purpose is to assert national pride to a practical industry with real and direct benefits, it will only be by unleashing the creative force of free and rational minds. Extending man's reach into space is not, as some have claimed, our "destiny." Standing between us and the stars are enormous technical difficulties, the solution of which will require even more heroic determination than that which tamed the seas and the continents. But first, we must make a fundamental choice: will America continue to hold its best engineering minds captive to politics, or will we set them free?

Paragraphs are your friends.

Rather than lavishing money on new missions of dubious value, President Bush should consider a truly radical solution for America's moribund space program: privatize it.

There is a contradiction at the heart of the space program: space exploration, as the grandest of man's technological advancements, requires the kind of bold innovation possible only to minds left free to pursue the best of their thinking and judgment. Yet by placing the space program under governmental funding, we necessarily place it at the mercy of governmental whim. The results are written all over the past twenty years of NASA's history: the space program is a political animal, marked by shifting, inconsistent, and ill-defined goals.

The space shuttle was built and maintained to please clashing constituencies, not to do a clearly defined job for which there was an economic and technical need. The shuttle was to launch satellites for the Department of Defense and private contractors—which could be done more cheaply by lightweight, disposable rockets. It was to carry scientific experiments—which could be done more efficiently by unmanned vehicles. But one "need" came before all technical issues: NASA's political need for showy manned vehicles. The result, as great a technical achievement as it is, was an over-sized, over-complicated, over-budget, overly dangerous vehicle that does everything poorly and nothing well.

Indeed, the space shuttle program was supposed to be phased out years ago, but the search for its replacement has been halted, largely because space contractors enjoy collecting on the overpriced shuttle without the expense and bother of researching cheaper alternatives. A private industry could have fired them—but not so in a government project, with home-district congressmen to lobby on their behalf.

There is reason to believe that the political nature of the space program may have even been directly responsible for the Columbia disaster. Fox News reported that NASA chose to stick with non-Freon-based foam insulation on the booster rockets, despite evidence that this type of foam causes up to 11 times as much damage to thermal tiles as the older, Freon-based foam. Although NASA was exempted from the restrictions on Freon use, which environmentalists believe causes ozone depletion, and despite the fact that the amount of Freon released by NASA's rockets would have been trivial, the space agency elected to stick with the politically correct foam.

It is impossible to integrate the contradictory. To whatever extent an engineer is forced to base his decisions, not on the realities of science but on the arbitrary, unpredictable, and often impossible demands of a politicized system, he is stymied. Yet this politicizing is an unavoidable consequence of governmental control over scientific research and development.

Nor would it be difficult to spur the private exploration of space. Phase out government involvement in space exploration, and the free market will work to produce whatever there is demand for, just as it now does with traditional aircraft, both military and civilian. Develop a system of property rights to any stellar body reached and exploited by an American company, and profit-minded business will have the incentive to make it happen.

We often hear that the most ambitious projects can only be undertaken by government, but in fact the opposite is true. The more ambitious a project is, the more it demands to be broken into achievable, profit-making steps—and freed from the unavoidable politicizing of government-controlled science. If space development is to be transformed from an expensive national bauble whose central purpose is to assert national pride to a practical industry with real and direct benefits, it will only be by unleashing the creative force of free and rational minds.

Extending man's reach into space is not, as some have claimed, our "destiny." Standing between us and the stars are enormous technical difficulties, the solution of which will require even more heroic determination than that which tamed the seas and the continents. But first, we must make a fundamental choice: will America continue to hold its best engineering minds captive to politics, or will we set them free?

As an aside, show me where the American private sector has done anything maverick in the past 30 years.

Show me any venture in the private sector that is willing to do a decade's worth of R&D on any given pertaining to space travel.

Show me any venture that won't copyright and trademark any such inventions and jealously keep it to themselves under the auspices of the DMCA.

And this guy seriously thinks that private industry will lead the way into successful space exploration? That's a laugh. The only thing the commercial sector will do is what benefits them directly...which means that the space program will be reduced to sending up communications satellites so we can be reminded 500 times a day that Things Go Better With Brand X.

I can see it now...

"That's one small step for man...one giant leap for marketing!"

Privatize is another word for abandon. No corporation will send men to Mars or the Moon.

Actually, the opposite is true. A public space program is a program that those who hate the whole idea idea of space programs have an input to. After all, you're taking their money too, so they will rightly demand a say. And what even those who feel merely indifferent to space programs say is that whenever anything goes wrong, no more crews are going to fly until it's "perfectly safe". Of course, in a tough new environment like space, it's never perfectly safe. This is why we get a space program that spends its time doing milkruns to a symbolic orbital station, accomplishing nothing.

Space exploration should be placed into the hands of private freebooters responsible to nothing and no one. If we cut the government's role back to setting up a system of homesteaded property rights on space assets, THEN we'll see "California or bust" once again.

It may have be created by DARPA, but did it get anywhere without microsoft or other private companies?

Actually, it took a step backward thanks to the likes of Microsoft and AOL. The Internet used to have a built-in intelligence tests to keep incomprehensibly asinine dolts off the Internet. But since Microsoft and its GUI ilk came along, the Internet has been beseiged with crap like MyDoom, ILOVEYOU, Melissa, Nimda and Code Red.

You call that progress?

I'm sure the private sector was capable of creating microcomputers without government funding for the apollo program.

Then why didn't it? Heck, the first pocket calculator didn't come into existence until well after the first moon landing. Even the head of IBM (the only game in town when it came to business machines back in the '60s and '70s) didn't see a need for home computers. And you're trying to tell me the private sector would have built something that they didn't even think the consumer wanted?

Got some coffee right here you need to smell...

So you advocate the government selling land rights on the moon and Mars to corporations? That's interesting and I hope it comes to that one day, although the Outer Space Treaty forbids private ownership or state ownership of those places. I guess we can always ignore it, as the Chinese surely will when they get there.

The government can't "sell land rights" to space assets because it doesn't officially own anything. The reason there is no private inerest in space is that the Outer Space Treaty, drafted during a period of global faith in socialism, forbids private ownership, as in Antarctica.

What I propose is that we renegotiate the Outer Space Treaty and get it replaced with one that establishes a rigbht of homestead for people willing to take the risk. This should not be hard to do because the left believes that space is worthless and unexplorable, so why should they care about rights given hypothetical colonists who don't yet exist? If they insist, we can give them windmills or dolphins or something to sweeten the deal.

"What I propose is that we renegotiate the Outer Space Treaty and get it replaced with one that establishes a rigbht of homestead for people willing to take the risk."

40 acres and a mule won't work on Mars. There's no air, almost no water, it's cold as all getout, and the soil is toxic. How can you homestead in that? It'll cost millions of dollars per person per year in life support, and the only things that can be done there for the foreseeable future until the planet is somehow terraformed are scientific research and mineral extraction, and the minerals can only be used on Mars because it's too expensive to boost them to Earth.

I don't see anyone homesteading in Antarctica and that's downright homey compared to Mars. At least you can breath the air there, and you don't need a rocket to get there, so Mars is a heck of a stretch.

Have you read the book "Red Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson? It's a wonderful sci-fi book about the colonization of Mars. Anyone interested in the space program and especially in Mars should check it out.

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