There’s something about space policy that makes conservatives
forget their principles. Just one mention of NASA, and
conservatives are quite happy to check their small-government
instincts at the door and vote in favor of massive government
programs and harsh regulations that stifle private enterprise. It’s
time to abort that mission.
Loren Thompson,
writing in the Forbes Business in the Beltway blog,
recently suggested that President Obama’s space policy represents
the “end of the road” for U.S. manned space flight. Yet Thompson is
simply repeating a defense of pork barrel politics that would play
well in Huntsville or Houston. Moreover, his claim that President
Bush had a plan that “might have one day carried astronauts to
Mars,” while Obama’s version is “a science fair that literally goes
nowhere,” misrepresents both plans.
The canceled Constellation program, former NASA
administrator Mike Griffin’s flawed implementation of Bush’s Vision
for Space Exploration, focused on the moon, and was an unaffordable
redo of Apollo, with no capability or plans to go to Mars, and poor
prospects for returning to the moon for that matter. What Mr.
Thompson derides as a “science fair” is the development of new
technologies that will enable affordable visits not just to the
moon, but to asteroids, the moons of Mars, the Martian surface, and
points beyond — at much lower cost.
On its cost and schedule trajectory, Constellation would
have created a gap of at least seven years — until 2017 at the
earliest — during which we would have had to continue to purchase
Soyuz launches and capsules from Russia, to use for crew changeouts
and as lifeboats for the International Space Station. This is
particularly ironic, because under the Bush plans, the ISS itself
would be abandoned two years earlier, in 2015!
On the other hand, with the new plans, U.S. involvement
with the ISS will continue until at least 2020 (and probably
beyond). New commercial capabilities to deliver astronauts both to
the station and to low-Earth orbit for exploration beyond would
become available no later than 2015 (and probably earlier), at a
small fraction of the cost of the planned Constellation rocket: the
Ares I launcher and Orion crew capsule.
The new NASA plan would make those capabilities available
not just to a few NASA civil servants, but to all comers, including
private space researchers and sovereign clients (foreign
governments) that have signed memoranda of understanding with
Bigelow Aerospace to lease its planned orbital facilities,
independent of the ISS.
The U.S. will thereby become a seller of human space
transportation services, instead of a supplicant to and purchaser
of them from Russia. Call us crazy, but the former plan looks a lot
more like the “end of U.S. human spaceflight” than does the
latter.
When Thompson writes that “those U.S. ‘entrepreneurs’
needed billions of dollars from the federal government to develop
rockets based on old technology before they could take over from
the Russians,” we can only shake our heads sadly.
First, there is no reason for the scare quotes around
“entrepreneurs.” Space Exploration Technologies has invested
hundreds of millions of its own money to develop its Falcon
launcher and Dragon capsule, scheduled to fly next month, for a
tiny fraction of the projected cost of Ares/Orion. SpaceX has a
huge backlog of orders. In fact, to meet its ISS obligations as
soon and cost effectively as possible, NASA needs SpaceX and other
commercial crew providers more than SpaceX needs NASA.
Thompson also suggests that NASA’s scrapped plans did not
involve “old technology,” when in fact the program was premised on
reusing Shuttle components — and thus maintaining their associated
jobs, which is why the Shuttle program has remained so expensive
and was so popular with politicians.
Finally, when Thompson complains about the long
development time for the planned heavy lifter, he implies that such
a vehicle is necessary for human exploration beyond Earth orbit.
That misconception has been a major stumbling block for such
missions ever since humans last walked on the Moon almost 40 years
ago.
In fact, the United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of
Boeing and Lockheed-Martin, has developed and described viable
mission scenarios in which lunar missions can be accomplished with
existing launch systems. All that is needed is a little innovation,
and to break out of the mindset of the Apollo Cargo Cult, in which
anything that doesn’t resemble Apollo — a specific destination, a
date, and a really big rocket — isn’t a real human exploration
program.
It is time for conservatives to recognize that Apollo is
over. We must recognize that Apollo was a centrally planned
monopolistic government program for a few government employees, in
the service of Cold War propaganda and was therefore itself an
affront to American values. If we want to seriously explore, and
potentially exploit space, we need to harness private enterprise,
and push the technologies really needed to do so.
