While I’m not a conservative, some of my best friends are, and I am sympathetic to that philosophy, so it pains me to see such an inadvertently unconservative post on space policy appear in The Corner from Jeffrey Anderson. I responded briefly at my blog, but I’m grateful to Kathryn to allow me some space here for a more proper rebuttal.
Short version, human-spaceflight policy is one of the few things that Obama seems to be getting right, at least from a conservative standpoint.
Longer version:
The Bush Vision for Space Exploration, announced a year after the loss of the Columbia, in January 2004, was a good goal, and it got off to a decent start. Unfortunately, once he replaced Sean O’Keefe, the NASA administrator, with Mike Griffin in 2005, the wheels started to come off. As the Augustine Panel pointed out this past fall, there was little prospect with the current plans of getting back to the moon on the stipulated schedule, and in anything resembling an affordable way. Unfortunately, once they’d hired the rocket scientist as the new administrator, the White House had simply put it on autopilot, because they had understandably higher priorities. For those interested, I wrote a long essay on the history of the human-spaceflight program last summer at The New Atlantis, right up to present day minus five months or so, that explains why NASA in its current form isn’t an institution that a conservative should support at all (in fact, per Jonah’s new formulation, it arguably even has fascist aspects to it). But many conservatives do support NASA as a result of the historical contingencies of Apollo. I know that it’s become popular of late for conservatives to laud JFK (who admittedly wouldn’t recognize, or probably even be allowed in today’s Democrat party), but it’s important to understand what Apollo was, and wasn’t. It was a victory in the Cold War over the Soviets, but because we were at war, we waged it with a state socialist enterprise. What it was not was the first step of opening up the frontier to humanity, and it was in fact a false start that has created a template for NASA and a groove in which we’ve been stuck for over four decades now, with many billions spent and little useful progress.
Part of the mindset that grew out of that era was that Space = NASA, and that “Progress in Space” = “Funding NASA” and that not funding NASA, or adequately funding NASA, or changing NASA’s goals, is a step backwards. But as I noted at Popular Mechanics yesterday on the 24th anniversary of the Challenger loss, that tragedy had a good outcome, in that it allowed private industry to start to become more involved in space exploration, a trend that continues (and that the Bush/Griffin administration did support, albeit with paltry funding, in the form of the Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program to pick up slack in delivering cargo to the space station after Shuttle is retired this year or next). We have been in fact developing, though far too slowly, the sort of private-enterprise (and more intrinsically American than Soviet in nature) space program that might have evolved more naturally had we not been sidetracked by Apollo in the sixties.
What the administration is doing finally ending the model of the government having a state socialist design bureau to build a monopoly transportation system for its own use, at tremendous cost, which is politically supportable because of all the pork it provides to Alabama, Florida, and Texas. It proposes to expand the COTS program to provision of crew changeout in addition to cargo delivery, encouraging competition, and providing a robust capability that won’t put us out of business when the government rocket fails, as has happened twice with the Shuttle in the past quarter century, for almost three years each time. Instead of a program projected to cost many tens of billions over the next decade for a NASA-owned-and-operated new rocket (Ares I) that will cost billions per flight of four astronauts, it is going to invest 6 billion dollars in developing private capability, with multiple competitors, and do it on a fixed-price, pay-for-performance basis, rather than the wasteful cost-plus model that inevitably results in overruns due to the perverse incentives.
At the same time, it is going to divert the funds being wasted by NASA on that redundant and unnecessary new rocket, and put them back into R&D for the kind of hardware necessary to actually get beyond low earth orbit (such as earth-departure stages, landers, propellant storage facilities, lunar resource utilization, etc.), R&D that had been starved by Mike Griffin in his desperation to find funds for his out-of-control Ares program. Yes, the administration has said that the moon is no longer an explicit, scheduled goal, but that doesn’t mean that we won’t go there. In fact, we’ll be in much better shape to do so with the new plans than we ever would have with the current ones, should we decide to do so in the future. And in addition to the moon, we’ll have the capability to visit, or divert asteroids, missions to the moons of Mars, and perhaps even Mars’s surface, because instead of wasting money on a new launch vehicle, we will have developed the affordable in-space infrastructure that allows us to do other things once private industry delivers us to orbit.
A couple other points. Contra Mr. Anderson (and with all due respect, Dr. Krauthammer), as another knowledgable space blogger (and space entrepreneur, part of the team that recently won the Lunar Landing Challenge) notes at my site, getting to and from orbit is not the most dangerous part of a space mission:
The vast majority of the danger for any beyond earth orbit mission is going to happen while you’re out there in the wilds. Even NASA agreed that an astronaut is about 30x more likely to die from something other than launch than they are to die during the ascent phase of the mission. If you only include the atmospheric reentry part in that number, it might drop to something only ~15-20x more likely to die from the actual BEO portion of a mission than from the ascent/descent phases. Even if you go with the really pessimistic ESAS LOC numbers for stock EELVs, you’re still talking about over 90% of the mission risks being from portions of the mission outside of earth orbit.
Note that Apollo XIII, the closest we came to losing Apollo astronauts in flight, occurred halfway to the moon. Had the tank explosion occurred on the way back, when there was no lunar module as backup, we would have lost that crew, no matter how much of an option Gene Kranz said failure wasn’t. From an overall mission safety perspective, spending tens of billions on a new launch system in the hope that it will be “safer” is a tragic misallocation of resources.
I would also note that it’s ironic that in defending a bloated government program, Mr. Anderson uses the same arguments as the Left uses for theirs. Yes, NASA spending creates jobs. The issue is (as Bastiat famously asked about the window repairers) does it create wealth? And how many jobs in the private sector aren’t created because NASA is discouraging private activities by competing with them with government dollars?
If the choice is between having no space program at all, and the current one, perhaps the latter is preferable. But if the choice is spending the taxpayers’ money to create wealth and new industries while actually accomplishing things in space and perhaps finally opening it up for the rest of us, versus a wasteful jobs program for Marshall Spaceflight Center, I know which I’d prefer. The new administration plans will take us much more in that direction, and on the rare occasion that it gets something right, true conservatives should be applauding it, rather than recycling hoary tropes about “staying close to home,” and “going nowhere.” Sadly, it was the misbegotten policy of the previous administration that was doing that. At least in this area, it’s change I can believe in.
— Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism, and Internet security. He writes about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings.