October 4 marked the 52nd anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite put into orbit. The event set off a panic in the United States with politicians and citizens alike believing that the Russians had a huge lead in the “space race” and that it left the US vulnerable to attack from above.
In order to catch up, President Eisenhower and Congress formed the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - an agency that took space research and development out of the hands of the military, and put civilians in charge. This proved to be a stroke of genius since all the innovations and technical advances spurred on by the space industry were applied immediately to practical, real world uses in the private sector.
Entire industries were born as a result of our push for the moon. It would not be overstating the case to say that our information revolution, the revolution in optics, in a variety of other fields would not have occurred quite the same way without NASA’s need to create the technologies and engineer the systems that allowed us to beat the Russians to the moon. In short, if the goal was to get to the moon as quickly as possible and darn the cost, while spurring investment in new technologies, NASA did a fine job.
But was the MISS program (Man in Space Soonest) really the best way to get into space? Sadly, the answer is no. Without the spur of Sputnik , it is a certainty that the US space program would have developed much differently, with the private sector leading the way and government involvement minimized.
Today, it costs over $10,000 per pound to put a man into space, keep him alive, and return him to earth safely. That’s what our tax dollars are buying every time the Space Shuttle takes off. And the Shuttle doesn’t go anywhere. It is a space taxi to the International Space Station - an aging, obsolete, dangerous vehicle that eats up nearly 80% of NASA’s budget and will not be retired because its defenders in Congress fear the loss of jobs for their constituents.
It is costing taxpayers more than $15 billion to develop a new launch vehicle and crew module to get us back to the moon - if we go at all. NASA’s contracting process is so inefficient that hundreds of millions are added on to the cost of services and hardware because of bottlenecks, duplicate tasking, and other bureaucratic nonsense.
There must be a better way; and there is. October 4 also marked the five year anniversary of the flight of Spaceship One, winner of the X-Prize for being the first privately developed vehicle to put man into space. Developed by Bert Ruttan’s company Scaled Composites, it was a modest effort. The vehicle was dropped from the belly of a modified 747 at 48,000 feet and then soared to 100 kilometers (62 miles) above the Mojave desert.
But the rocketplane cost about $100 million to develop and fly. NASA can’t even clear its throat at that price. And following in Ruttan’s footsteps are a dozen or more deadly serious competitors who are extremely well funded and determined to build their own rockets in order to get a slice of the lucrative satellite launching business, as well as what will be the real growth industry of the early 21st century; space tourism.
It sounds like science fiction, but in less than a decade we are likely to see a couple of companies make going into space much more routine than NASA ever overpromised with the Shuttle. They will be ferrying tourists at first - the idle rich who don’t mind spending a million dollars for the flight of a lifetime. But not long afterwards, the commercial potential of space will be exploited. Imagine new products that can only be manufactured in zero gravity, or even private ventures to the moon to mine the mineral rich surface. The designs and testing of this hardware is already well along and will become a reality long before NASA’s self imposed deadline of returning to the moon in 2020.
The point being - get NASA out of the space taxi business. Force the agency to develop rockets and other space infrastructure that can address a broad range of missions, and not just ferrying people back and forth to the ISS. The cost reduction from $10,000 per pound to around $1,500 per pound for getting man in space is already very close to being a reality. And the more companies that enter the race for space dollars, the lower that number will go.
Sooner than we can imagine, if NASA takes the road of helping and encouraging our nascent private space industry rather than standing in its way, anyone who might have been able to afford a ticket on the old Concorde will be able to visit a first class hotel in orbit. These new companies are developing rockets that can do the job at a fraction of what NASA charges the taxpayer.
There are skeptics who have heard all of this before and are dubious about success. But the list of companies who are striving to achieve these spectacular goals is long. And they have found plenty of private and institutional investors willing to pony up the dollars to make their dreams a reality.
The future of manned spaceflight is not in the hands of a government bureaucracy, spending tax payer monies to prop up old systems and old dreams. It is in the hands of entrepreneurs who will make spaceflight accessible to the masses and one day, take us to the stars.
Rick Moran's Bio
Rick Moran is the Chicago editor of Pajamas Media, an associate editor of American Thinker and the proprietor of the blog Rightwing Nuthouse.
Posted
10-06-2009 12:01 AM
Link to this post: