I find the current debate over President Obama’s new space policy mind-bendingly ironic. We have a radical president bent on socializing and nationalizing everything from the auto industry to hospitals, but when he comes up with a policy that actually harnesses free enterprise, we hear from conservatives nothing but complaints. Robert Costa, like many, seems to continue to view the space program through Apollo-colored glasses, 40 years on.
There is no recognition in his or any other criticism of just what a programmatic disaster Constellation has become (I write “become,” but it has been this way since its inception five years ago — it only became clearly recognizable to most in the past year or so, its failure accentuated by the report of the Augustine panel last fall). Barack Obama was not responsible for that. As for Costa’s concern about the loss of jobs at Kennedy Space Center, he must be unaware that the shutdown of the space-shuttle program, with nothing to replace it immediately, was a Bush administration policy laid down more than six years ago. Never mind that the space program should not be a jobs program, although, unfortunately, it long ago became one. Where were the complaints then?
The so-called conservative opposition to this new direction in space policy seems, at least to me, to come from three motivations: a visceral and intrinsic (and understandable) distaste for any policy that emanates from this White House; a nostalgia for the good old days, when we had a goal and a date and a really big rocket and an unlimited budget (what I’ve described as the “Apollo cargo cult”); and, in the case of such politicians as Senators Shelby, Hutchison, Hatch, et al., pure rent seeking for their states. Of course, these aren’t mutually exclusive: For some, all three apply. But none of these reasons addresses the problems with the status quo or the wisdom of the new policy.
Equally ironic is the embrace by modern conservatives of Jack Kennedy, whose supposed vision about space is a myth. Yes, like Barack Obama’s speeches, his Rice speech was inspiring — sort of, if you didn’t think very hard about it. Is something worth doing just because it’s hard? Really? As I noted a few years ago:
It would be hard to move Pikes Peak from Colorado to Florida. It would be even harder to build a life-size replica of the World Trade Center with used q-tips. Those things would also serve to “organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” That doesn’t make them worth doing.
But Kennedy was trying to inspire and to win a Cold War. In reality, he wasn’t that into space, as he told his NASA administrator, Jim Webb, a couple of months before his assassination. Had he lived, the program might even have been cancelled, depending on how things were going in Vietnam.
The reality is that Obama’s new space policy is more conservative than George W. Bush’s was, as I noted two-and-a-half months ago when the new budget was first released. Don’t take my word for it — ask Newt Gingrich or Bob Walker, or Dana Rohrabacher, conservatives who follow space policy closely and aren’t swept up in nostalgia for a Space Age that never really was, at least not in terms of making human spaceflight affordable or sustainable. The opposition from so many Republicans and conservatives to this new policy, which analysts and space activists have been seeking for years, is both frustrating and mystifying. As a former staffer for both Gingrich and Rohrabacher said at a recent space conference, “Democrats don’t think that capitalism works within the atmosphere, and Republicans apparently don’t think it works above it.”
The previous plan was going to give us (at development costs much greater than originally estimated, and much later than originally planned) the capability to send a few people back to the moon some time in the late 2020s at a cost of billions per astronaut. Ares/Orion alone — just to get to low-Earth orbit, without the lunar capability — was going to cost a couple billion per flight, which is much more than the shuttle costs, for much less capability. And like the shuttle, it presented multiple single-point failures: If something happened that resulted in the system’s being shut down while an investigation occurred, the nation would have no capability to get crews into space at all (as happened with the shuttle, twice, for almost three years each time). It was the very antithesis of the affordability and sustainability that the Aldridge Commission, assembled after the announcement of Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration in January of 2004, declared necessary. Note that this wasn’t what might go wrong if the policy were implemented poorly — it was the baseline plan. That it was being poorly executed as well just made it that much worse.
The new plan gives us redundant capabilities to get people to orbit, and competition among the multiple providers will drive down prices not just for NASA but for everyone, including those who want to use Bob Bigelow’s orbital facilities for business or pleasure. It will develop, finally, the technologies needed to reduce the costs of going beyond Earth orbit as well. It will open up space not just for NASA astronauts but for all, Americans and others, to seek their own dreams there. It may be intrinsically unconservative to have a federal human-spaceflight program in the first place, but politics would seem to dictate that it’s going to continue. If so, don’t we want to see that money spent on a more effective, more conservative, and fundamentally American approach to opening up space? If so, then Obama’s space program beats the previous one, which was based on the anachronistic Apollo model.
The new policy isn’t perfect. I would have preferred that the president not be so openly dismissive of the moon. “Been there, done that” is not a sound basis for selection of goals. Besides, we barely scratched the surface and haven’t yet done a proper assessment of the possibilities of using its resources for further reductions in transportation costs (something that the VSE got right — unfortunately, the technology was starved by Mike Griffin’s Ares overruns). But that doesn’t matter right now. If we can finally get on with the business of letting private industry take on the (literally) mundane task of getting people only 200 miles above and let NASA focus on new technologies, there is plenty of time over the next few years to decide exactly where to go from there — and Barack Obama will not be involved in that decision. The important thing is that we had to euthanize NASA’s expensive, unneeded new rockets and move on to the more critical development of opening up space. We’re now on a path to do so, assuming that Obama’s plan survives Congress.
Many don’t trust President Obama to execute this policy along these lines. Neither do I, necessarily. But I’d rather have good policy poorly executed than poor policy well executed. The execution can always be improved later. Do I believe that Obama really cares as much about human spaceflight as he said in his speech at the Cape? No, and I think that’s a good thing. I think he sees NASA as a problem he inherited from George W. Bush, and in that, he is right for once. He assigned to the problem people who do care about getting humans into space and, like Bush, he now wants to move on to other matters. Really, we should fear the day he gets interested in spaceflight; that will be the day that private enterprise is no longer trusted to conduct it. Let’s hope that day never comes. In the meantime, remember that when government does the right thing, it doesn’t matter whether it’s done for the wrong reason. Whatever the motivations behind it, this is a much more visionary space policy than we’ve ever had before.
– Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer, serial entrepreneur, and consultant on space commercialization. He blogs at Transterrestrial Musings.