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.
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.