Backers: Privatize Moon-Mars Mission Funds

Supporters of President Bush's goal of sending manned flights to the moon and Mars told a U.S. Senate subcommittee Wednesday that private dollars should be used to help pay for such missions.

"Every dollar that comes in commercially is a dollar the taxpayer doesn't have to come up with," said Charles Chafer, president of private aerospace company Team Encounter. "Fortunately, there is money that is available."

Bush last month announced his election-year initiative to send astronauts to the moon, Mars and beyond. He wants robotic missions to the moon no later than 2008 and the first manned flight of a new spacecraft by 2014. The missions are likely to cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

Robert Lorsch, a Los Angeles businessman and space enthusiast who has lobbied for decades to commercialize the space program, contends money-raising wouldn't be hard. He suggested methods as diverse as corporate sponsorships of space missions to selling screen savers of the Mars rovers for $1 a piece.

"There is so much enthusiasm, support and good will," Lorsch told the subcommittee's chairman, Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas. "There is just no way for people to express it."

"We have got to get resources to this program to make it work," Brownback told Lorsch in a public hearing near the Johnson Space Center outside Houston.

NASA associate administrator William Readdy said the agency is "committed to fulfilling the new challenge."

He said NASA can refocus some of its money toward the new priorities. For example, plans call for shifting money from the space shuttles, which will be retired at the end of the decade.

Every taxpayer should demand that commercial space companies be allowed to help develop space, rather than letting NASA continue to spend your hard-earned money. We demand no less in other areas that government involves itself in society.

Privatizing the space program would be a step backwards and would effectively reduce the space program to exclusively sending up satellites.

Commercial business has no use for research and development (most can't justify it to their stockholders and have abandoned it long ago). Yet we're supposed to believe that all will magically change to far-sighted support for spending money, time and resources on researching, developing and sending probes and ships to Mars and other points in our solar system?

If the commercial sector could bear the rigors of space exploration, it would. The claim that NASA has an exclusive claim on space exploration is rubbish. There are no prohibitions against the private sector going into space...yet none of them have. And it's not simply because NASA is there. It's because they can't (and won't) look beyond the next quarter's figures when space exploration requires a decade-long vision at minimum.

I suggest that you do some research yourself on the commercial space sector before you make such uninformed claims.

I suggest you do some research in how business works. You think stuff is being outsourced overseas for giggles? Hate to break it to you, but business doesn't care about science unless it directly benefits its immediate operations.

As for being "uninformed," I have yet to see you even attempt to dispute my assertions with anything apart from your sanctimonious attitude.

I suggest that you do some research yourself on the commercial space sector before you make such uninformed claims.

As for being "uninformed," I have yet to see you even attempt to dispute my assertions with anything apart from your sanctimonious attitude.

Ok, I don't want this to degenerate here into an I'm right and your wrong thing:

So, what is it about the private space sector that I don't know that I should know?

I get the position that I currently have from the fact that the private sector has not yet done any manned space flight, though I understand there is about to be a robotic one to the moon. I take this to mean that the invisible hand has not yet seen space as a viable business prospect and I don't really see any way in the future for private manned flight to be profitable without previous space experience that is not motivated by profit.

So I ask you this: Why is it that you see manned private spaceflight as currently profitable?

I volunteered at the Bush Cheney website and sent this letter to all the newspapers in the Dallas Fort Worth area.

To the Moon and Beyond1

It’s been over a month since President Bush delivered his space initiative. The rovers on Mars and the promise of Jedi Knights, Wookies and Captain Kirk and the Enterprise cause most folks’ eyes to glaze over. One caller to CSPAN wailed, “Why do we want to go to the moon? We need jobs here on Earth!” When JFK set our goal of “... landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.” What did LBJ do? He brought the Manned Space Flight Center to Houston and created many jobs right here in the metroplex.

The Aviation and Space industry and jobs have resided in Texas since 1914 when Kelly Field was opened in San Antonio. Love Field and the Mid Cities aviation plants began with the opening of Plant 19 at Carswell. Speaker Sam Rayburn and Representative Jim Wight helped to develop the aviation infrastructure in North Texas. We have seen B-24s, B-36s, B-58s, F111s and F-16s roll out of the Carswell plant over the last 65 years. Naval aviation aircraft were built and operated from the Dallas Naval Air Station. The space shuttle wing, heat rejection system were built by Loral in Grand Prairie. Today the Heat Rejection System for the International Space Station comes from that same Loral plant and the first two radiators have been launched and are working just fine, thank you Texas engineers, technicians, and other Space Cadets!

When President Bush announced a return to the moon it was obvious to me that those space craft and Lunar Colony habitat modules could/would be manufactured right here in the metroplex. NASA has been given a goal and the Department of Commerce, The DFW Chamber of Commerce and the metroplex companies that will benefit from this program need to get on the stick. Several years ago Boeing was looking for a new home. We lobbied for their headquarters to locate here but they chose Chicago. It’s time for some future thinkers to “go get the business”. Beale Aerospace was ahead of its time but it’s not too late for the local Chambers and industrialists to go for the gold. Modifying the International Space Station so that it can be the “Alliance Airport” of the Earth/Lunar highway would just be duplicaing what the Perot family did North of Fort Worth. Visionary enterprises like Braniff will bring jobs, wealth and international recognition to the Metroplex and maybe will one day be recognizzed as our first steps to the stars. Ad Astra Y’All.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.