U.S. Space Policy’s Missing Element: Vision

As launch vehicles go, the Space Council Quayle perfectly fits Washington’s conception of clever engineering design: It isn’t quite expendable and it isn’t quite unmanned. While Space Council Quayle certainly has plenty of boosters, the craft lacks adequate thrust and direction. The only thing more uncertain than the policy payloads are its political payoffs.

It’s not that Dan Quayle and the policy-setting Space Council that he oversees lack the right stuff, it’s that they may be using the wrong stars for navigation. Quayle’s Council has to decide what the nation really should do in space. If Quayle isn’t careful--and smart--he’s guaranteed to attract even nastier gibes from editorial cartoonists. On the other hand, the vice president might command both attention and respect--not to mention valuable political chits--if he displays some unanticipated insights and the guts to act on them.

There’s little question that the Bush Administration is serious about space. The Administration’s new budget proposes $15.2 billion for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration next fiscal year--a 24% increase, by far the largest percentage increase for any major agency. The nearly $3-billion boost includes a $2.6-billion allocation for the manned space platform, which is to be launched starting in 1995. Whether Congress will go along isn’t clear, but spokesmen as powerful as Office of Management and Budget Director Richard G. Darman publicly stress that space investment is a priority.

Unlike the Reagan Administration, the Bush Administration is quite comfortable with an active government role in promoting space. “The ideologues are gone,” comments John M. Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University and a consultant to the Space Council. “They’ve been replaced by kinder, gentler and more pragmatic people.”

“The previous Administration believed in the Vacuum Theory of Space Commerce,” says Richard DalBello, director of the Commerce Department’s Office of Space Commerce and a working group member of the Space Council. “That if the government would only get out of the way, things would be fine--the private sector would immediately be sucked in.”

This notion of space as an El Dorado for cosmic entrepreneurs inspired everyone from Fortune 500 behemoths to NASA technocrats. The Space Shuttle was championed as the chariot for space commercialization: a cheap, reusable Volkswagen to the Stars. Back in 1983, the Center for Space Policy Studies in Cambridge, Mass., predicted that $40 billion a year worth of microchips would be space-made by the turn of the century. Rare pharmaceuticals would be space-processed. Aerospace companies would make millions placing platforms in orbit. We’d even mine the moon for minerals.

With the notable exception of telecommunications satellites (and, possibly, remote sensing satellites), commercialization of space has proven an unmitigated financial disaster. Great expectations have burst into greater disappointments. The economies of scope and scale that we associate with commercially successful technological innovations haven’t been found in space. Space has been consistently more elusive, unreliable and expensive than any of the “experts” had predicted. “If God had wanted us to fly in space,” ruefully noted one industry consultant, “he would have given us more money.”

To its credit, the Bush Administration doesn’t drool too noticeably when it discusses the prospects of space commercialization, preferring instead to emphasize that the federal government should exploit market forces for whatever space aspirations it has. “The government should act in its own interest,” says Commerce’s DalBello. “It should buy products and services from its own suppliers at the best cost. The key word is efficiency, not subsidy.”

Nevertheless, there is a core of people in Washington like DalBello who, despite its sorry history, genuinely feel that space profits are only a few billion taxpayer dollars away. “I do believe that there’s a there there; we’re surrounded by ideas that are just coming into the fore. . . . When you look at examples from other areas, you see it takes decades for a new market to establish itself. For space, all it takes is one big success and all the sniggering about Tang and Velcro go away.”

My view is that space is the industry of the future--and always will be. It’s Quixote Capitalism.

The gutsy move would be for the Administration to cheerfully acknowledge that investing in space is part of its “industrial policy” to bolster U.S. technology: “It’s a way of channeling government support of high technology in a way that’s socially and politically acceptable,” says George Washington University’s Logsdon.

Let’s look at another fact: Sooner or later, the defense budget is going to be drastically cut. Forget the “peace dividend,” for the moment; what’s going to happen to all those tens of thousands of defense aerospace jobs in California, Texas and Florida? Why not use the high-tech rise in a space budget to soften the hard blows of the shriveling defense budget? Thar’s votes in them thar budgets--and as chairman of the Space Council, Dan Quayle stands to reap the political benefits of the appropriate recommendations for space-tech spending.

But perhaps the most important act of leadership that Quayle’s Space Council could perform would be something more courageous than expedient. Come up with an articulate rationale for spending billions for space when we have so many problems on Earth. John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon could do it. It’s clearly gutless--and dishonest--to hype the potential of commercialization. “We’re not mature enough yet in the differentiation of why we’re in space,” says Logsdon. “There needs to be a divorcing between commercialization of space and the adventure of space.”

Yes, it’s awkward to reach for the stars while clutching your wallet--but it is possible to strike a balance between vision and budget. Commercialization is a nice but discredited theme. Quayle’s Space Council has a rare opportunity to fashion a public consensus--even a public enthusiasm--for space exploration for its own sake, and win political points to boot. If he doesn’t--”Beam me up, Scottie--There’s no intelligent life in this space policy.”