NASA Rebukes the Can-Do Ethic : Faltering Ambitions Are a Paradigm for Activist Government

Astronaut Sally Ride, heading a task force on future efforts for the space program, has called for the development of a lunar base as a step toward the ultimate goal--the exploration and settlement of the planet Mars. Her report comes less than a year after that of the President’s National Commission on Space, which called for similarly far-reaching initiatives.

Meanwhile, the space shuttle sits in its hangar, and it probably will not fly again until after the elections in 1988. Even then it will carry out only half the missions per year that had formerly been anticipated. The space-station project has ballooned in cost from $8 billion in 1984 to $32 billion today, with no clear view in sight as to just what it will do or who (except for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) wants it. Valuable satellites sit on the ground for the lack of a ride, with no launch dates in sight. And, through it all, NASA’s budget continues to increase, with $12.2 billion to be requested in fiscal 1989.

What’s happening here? Why, amid failure and fecklessness, do commissions continue to call for bold new goals, with presidential approval? It is easy, too easy, to say that NASA is simply a technological boondoggle full of leaf-rakers with engineering degrees. Certainly no one can doubt that NASA exists largely to boost the local economies of Brevard County, Florida (Cape Canaveral); Madison County, Alabama (Marshall Space Center), and Harris County, Texas (Johnson Space Center). But the significance of NASA runs deeper.

NASA is the most vivid and dramatic embodiment of a style of governance that characterizes our century. This style features two elements: master planning and state power. The master plan represents the work of a great guru: Chairman Mao, Karl Marx, Wernher von Braun. It amounts to a blueprint for the future, to draw on the technological forces of the age. And this blueprint, once fulfilled, will make life exciting, heroic, purposeful.

To implement the plan, there are the organs of state power. They will collect the taxes, organize the agencies and bureaucracies and carry forward the great work. They will overcome all obstacles, technical or political. They will embody the tide of History, and will usher in the future on the wings of the Plan.

This, of course, is a reasonable description of the great tyrannies of our age. We remember them for their cruelties, but their proponents saw their work differently. They believed that by sudden and dramatic acts they could harness the technology of our century, overturn old injustices and wrongs, and usher in a new age. The great totalitarianisms have been founded on the belief that the means existed whereby governments could shape the future, giving it a character that was to be exciting, heroic, suffused with a transcendent vision.

In our country the Constitution and the limits on federal power prevented these attitudes from subjecting us to a tyranny based on mass enthusiasm. What we got instead was activist government. We were spared the prison camps and police informers with which dictators had crushed those who dared to challenge the master plans. But we were not spared the plans, the taxes, the bureaucracies, the agencies--and the ultimate failure of the hope that the future could be designed by experts in Washington.

Activist government as we know it today began with John F. Kennedy. It is no accident that, barely four months into office, he called for us to land a man on the moon before 1970. That was a clear-cut goal that involved only technical obstacles. It would demonstrate the method and validate the hope that other NASA-like agencies would come forth to direct the nation into the future.

Then, when we reached the moon, the catch-phrase of the day was, “If we can land a man on the moon, why can’t we cure poverty or rebuild the cities?” It was not just a question; it was a political agenda. The Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Transportation, the Council of Economic Advisers, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, even the Justice Department were all part of this style of governance. Like NASA, all tried to combine organization, expertise and tax dollars to guide the nation anew.

That is why NASA has been and remains important. Its present impotence stands as a rebuke to activist government. It suggests that people might soon say, “If we can’t even launch a space shuttle, why should we think that government can do anything right?” And there are powerful interests throughout the government, as well as among its beneficiaries, who do not want this to happen.

That is why NASA will receive more money. That is why it will continue to pursue such efforts as the space station--no matter how costly, no matter that only NASA wants it. That is why commissions like Sally Ride’s will continue to call for bold new initiatives. For the alternative is to admit that NASA, the centerpiece of activist government--and, with it, the very concept of such a style of government--has failed. That is too much for people to accept. Twelve billion dollars, the cost of the annual NASA budget, is a cheap price to pay if it can stave off such a fate.