Space: Final Frontier or Just Final?

The future of U.S. space exploration is an open and interesting question. If Americans want to move forward, the issue of NASA's future seems obvious: the sooner it's shuttered, the better.

No one can deny NASA's past achievements. Created in 1958 in the wake of the shock of the Sputnik launch, NASA deliberately was modeled on the last successful teaming of government and science--the Manhattan project. It was re-energized in May 1961 when -- after only 15 minutes of manned spaceflight experience -- President Kennedy committed America to a moon landing within eight-and-a-half years. NASA's single-minded dedication, backed by nearly unlimited taxpayer funding, was possible only because the "space race" was interpreted as a Soviet military threat and public relations bid for leadership of the Third World. And of course NASA fulfilled Kennedy's promise, live on television before a half-billion viewers around the world.

It's been downhill ever since. With the Soviet menace easing and the public bored, the Apollo program was ended early, and Skylab de-orbited in flaming irrelevance. The supposedly reusable Space Shuttles had to be rebuilt after each flight, at enormous expense--and twice proved fatal.

Since then, NASA's emphasized unmanned missions, cost cutting and the public benefits of spin-off technologies. A half-built space station is inhabited, but literally orphaned, with each Astronaut's return dependant on a Russian rescue. Most recently, NASA news is dominated by employee buy-outs and potential scandal.

That the agency lacks leadership and objectives is an understatement. In the February 28th National Review on dead tree (subscription only), Alexander Rose says that, like the Shuttle, NASA's unrepairable:

NASA remains wedded to [Dr. Werner] von Braun’s postwar concepts of big-ticket, government-run space exploration. It’s owing to this obsession with the past that we have a creaky space station costing billions in “maintenance” each year, yet of no discernible use to anyone; an aging fleet of grounded space shuttles; and a predilection toward blasting expensive payloads into space using throwaway, titanically wasteful rockets. In this weird world, while the president’s new budget has proposed $4.5 billion for the shuttle, the ailing Hubble telescope can’t be fixed because the shuttles are too dangerous to be used on a repair mission. . .

[T]he space industry is not about exploring space; it’s about rather more touchingly terrestrial concerns, such as back-scratching, institutional rigidity, and astronomical piles of money. NASA is not the lean, mean forerunner of Starfleet Academy: It’s a high-wattage government-jobs project running a feeding-trough for the aerospace industry, the very same complex that has a vested interest in building our Atlas rockets (Lockheed Martin), Delta rockets (Boeing), and shuttles (a Lockheed-Martin/Boeing consortium).

So it tends to stick with what it knows. And what it knows is the way it managed to get a man on the moon in 1969. But that particular way was a historical accident, and what worked then is not practicable now.

Rose says the answer lies in space commercialization. The Citizens Against Government Waste agrees:

Few private corporations in 1958 had the resources or understanding to venture into space exploration, but today's technology provides NASA with a plethora of public-private opportunities to achieve more successful and cost-effective space exploration. Commercialization will produce substantial long-term savings and benefits, including:

• Better and more affordable space assets;


• Increased utilization of the shuttle, International Space Station and Reusable Launch Vehicle;


• Improved innovation and importation of commercial technology to space endeavors;


• Enhancement of U.S. industry competitiveness;


• Greater national prestige (which was one the foremost concerns when NASA was created in 1958).

After previous cuts, President Bush proposed only a modest increase in NASA's budget, insufficient for sci-fi speculation such as a Moon base or a mission to Mars.

I think both Rose and the budget busters are right--but timid. Just like the failure of communist command economies, the recent won-loss record of top-down government programs is dreadful. No public-private sector partnership is likely to work, or even be cost-effective. And despite Bert Rutan’s recent and impressive achievements -- his "SpaceShipOne" captured the $10 million Ansari X Prize -- the technology needed for planetary exploration is beyond reach of the current commercial space sector.

So let's prime the pump. Terminate all NASA's current missions, and redirect their efforts to an unmanned-Mars lander. That lander would carry a tiny payload--an unconditional note issued by the United States promising to pay the bearer $20 billion. Upon the successful Mars touchdown, NASA would publish a detailed map of the landing site--and then close. No more federal budget, no more agency. Just a potential future liability.

It worked for longitude--why not similarly jump-start the technological innovation necessary to get to Mars?