Opinion: Space turns 50!

NASA is a timid bureaucracy that goes crawling to Congress every year for a pittance (less than 1% of the federal budget) and will do anything — anything — to please. The agency even cozied up to the Russians when Al Gore told it to. Yet somehow, even though Washington essentially considers it a jobs program (sometimes for foreigners), NASA manages to accomplish some astonishing work. Let’s see. It has some really cool robots on Mars (I love those little guys) and others heading for the far reaches; it’s got some great telescopes out there looking almost to the beginning of the universe; it can put humans into orbit on a big old spaceplane; it has managed to bolt together a space station with some pretty good lab equipment aboard; and though most Americans aren’t aware of it, it’s also cutting metal to take its astronauts back to the moon and maybe beyond. In my opinion, those are some pretty amazing accomplishments for an agency so thoroughly ignored by its masters.Personally, I’ve got bigger hopes for NASA. I will stipulate it should keep putting telescopes in space so we can figure out where we fit in the universe, and it should also keep building those little robots that can and do. But I think its purpose should primarily be to invent, test and field the ships that will allow American industry to get out there, look around, and figure out how to make some money (hint: the solar system is awash with energy). Sure, building the big, reliable machines needed for that takes a great deal of money, but I say why not raid the federal budget for it? I mean, it’s not like it’s spending its annual $3 trillion (!!) of our money on much that’s worth anything, anyway. Iraq, anyone? Bosnia?

But you are far too kind to your former employer when you claim that the shuttle or space station are great achievements. Considering the vast national treasure that was expended on them, they were in fact policy disasters if the goal is to have humanity affordably accessing and utilizing space. Despite Mike Griffin’s more-recent backtracking against his faux pas of a couple years ago, when he called the shuttle ‘a mistake,’ he was right. And no, comparing them to other, even greater perceived wastes of federal expenditures doesn’t excuse them — at best, it damns them with faint praise. And in many ways, as we’ll discuss later in the week, the very existence of those programs has in fact for decades held back, not advanced, prospects for more cost-effective efforts by the private sector. ... If the goal is to have large-scale human activities in space, how can a vehicle that can only send a few government employees at a time, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per flight, or a space facility that can house only half a dozen, at a cost of billions per year, be said to advance such a goal? And how does NASA’s current plan of developing and operating for decades to come yet another single (and fragile) means of getting its astronauts (of which it has an oversupply) to orbit, at a cost of billions per lunar mission for a few civil servants, to occur once or twice a year (while the ‘rest of us’ voyeuristically watch on high-definition television) do so?