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 merican
Dennis Tito has finally realized his life's dream of traveling to
space. Russia's mostly privatized Energia rocket
company, like a good capitalist entrepreneur seeking to make money,
accepted his $20 million for a rocket ride to orbit and a week on
the International Space Station (ISS). In a strange reversal of
roles, top officials at NASA acted like old Soviet apparatchik central
planners and strongly opposed the trip. They reluctantly allow Tito
visit after making him sign agreement stating that if he broke something,
he'd pay for it. They even barred him from floating over to the
America side of the station without an escort, like petty little
children saying, "You can't come on my side of the room."
Few people believe that NASA's stated concern — that because
Tito is not a professional cosmonaut his presence might pose a danger
to the station — is the full story behind its opposition to
Tito's trip. After all, Tito trained for nine months before his
flight. And NASA saw no problems when it gave shuttle trips to Sen.
Jake Garn and Rep. Bill Nelson, neither professional astronauts,
in order to secure taxpayers' funds for its programs. (Let's grant
that Sen. John Glenn was qualified to fly, though his shuttle mission
was more PR than cutting edge science.) But NASA objected to a private
Russian company selling a trip into space to a private individual
in exchange for private funding.
NASA seems to fear a market in which customers purchase services
from private suppliers because such a market, in the long run, would
eliminate the need for NASA to fly rockets or build space stations.
That is why for three decades this government agency has fought
against private efforts that would have endangered its dominance
of space activities.
To understand fully the adverse effects of NASA's anti-market attitudes,
let's put the situation in historical context. Some 40 years after
the Wright Brothers first 1903 flight, commercially viable planes
were up and flying and tens of thousands of people if not many more
had taken to the skies. Over the past year Americans took a record
650 million trips by airplane. Yet four decades after men first
ventured into space, only about 400 people have left the Earth in
spacecraft. Even minor airports today have more flights per day
the Kennedy Space Center has in months.
NASA officials might argue that because the initial costs and difficulties
of manned space flight were many magnitudes more than for civil
aviation, that government development funds were necessary. This
is not necessarily an argument against a market approach. But even
when the federal government develops new, costly technologies, often
for defense purposes, it is the private sector that commercializes
them, making them available to everyone. The Pentagon developed
the first crude Internet technology, but private producers of personal
computers, software, and web servers that made that technology inexpensive
and open to all.
Consider one example of how NASA could have helped the private sector
make gold out of government garbage. Each shuttle flies 98 percent
of the way to orbit with an external fuel tank the size of a 17-story
building. Once the nontoxic liquid oxygen and hydrogen from those
tanks burn off, they are dropped into the ocean. If each shuttle
over the past two decades had placed its tank in orbit, there would
be about 100 of them in space — with nearly 30 acres of interior
space, about the size of the Pentagon — waiting to be sealed
and "homesteaded" by private owners for scientific labs, space hotels,
or honeymoon suites. NASA, of course, has no incentive to create
private competition for its ISS.
Today one private company, Space Island Group, wants develop a joint
venture with the tank division from manufacturer Lockheed-Martin.
It also wants to raise private capital and to work with shuttle
manufacturer Boeing to develop a Shuttle-II that could be produced
for about 10 percent of the cost of a current, all-purpose shuttle.
The S-II would simply ferry into orbit the tanks to be made into
space stations, and cargo and passengers for those stations. Apollo
11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin, an MIT engineer, has also designed a
new generation of vehicles to place the tanks, cargoes, and passengers
into orbit. We could all follow Dennis Tito!
The best future for businesses seeking new opportunities and all
individuals seeking to appreciate the wonders of the universe would
be for a private Kennedy Space Port operating with as much traffic
into orbit as the nearby Orlando International Airport. That vision
can only be realized if NASA gets out of the way and lets the private,
profit-making sector take over.
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