By Ben Boychuk and Lisa Schmeiser
With the Space Shuttle Atlantis finishing its final mission, the U.S. space program has reached a critical turning point. President Barack Obama in 2010 canceled the Constellation Program, ending exactly 50 years of U.S. manned space flight.
Now what? Russia's space program remains active, and China is planning a mission to the moon by 2025. Meantime, private U.S.-based companies are developing their own rockets and spacecraft to breach the final frontier.
Is that enough? Should restoring the U.S. manned-space program be a vital national priority? Or can the private sector fill the gap in an era of government austerity? RedBlueAmerica columnist Ben Boychuk and guest columnist Lisa Schmeiser weigh in.
In an era of multi-trillion-dollar budget deficits and a national debt of $14 trillion and climbing, pouring billions of tax dollars into manned space travel may not be the wisest use of limited resources.
Especially not when the private sector is stepping up and investing hundreds of millions of perfectly good dollars to advance the space race.
Billionaires such as Microsoft's Paul Allen, Amazon's Jeff Bezos and, of course, Virgin's Richard Branson are clearly committed to making commercial space travel a viable business.
"Governments are not going to be running the future of space travel," Branson told an audience at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference on Wednesday. "Private enterprise is." He's right. Branson's Virgin Galactic plans to begin regular launches into low Earth orbit next year. Other companies are looking even beyond the moon.
True, Russia and China remain heavily invested, too. And China's planned lunar mission is bold and exciting ― and the precise opposite of our federal government's posture toward space exploration for much of the past 30 years.
It isn't difficult to imagine an American team exploring not just the moon but also Mars within the next decade. But why should it be a crew from NASA? Robert Zubrin, president of Pioneer Astronautics in Colorado, noted in the Wall Street Journal recently that a company called SpaceX is close to launching a new rocket that could conceivably take people to Mars as early as 2016, at a fraction of the cost of a government-funded mission.
Will there be risks? Oh, yes. But as Zubrin argues: "For NASA managers to demand that the mission be delayed for decades while hundreds of billions are spent to marginally reduce the risk to a handful of volunteers, when the same funds spent on other priorities could save the lives of tens of thousands, is narcissistic in the extreme."
Who dares wins.
America needs to recommit to the space program on a national level. A renewed sense of purpose would ignite new generations of scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs. A heftier budget would kindle those sparks.
So why should the government be heading up the next phase of manned space exploration? Why not private industry? First, the groundwork that has already been laid belongs to we, the people. Taxpayers funded American space exploration. It is a national asset, not something to be given away for private profit.
Secondly, space operations sponsored by NASA are accountable to the American people in a way that private operations would not be. Space exploration is lethal. There will be casualties in the future. Loss of life should never be reduced to the cost of doing business.
We will lose intrepid explorers, and when we do, their deaths need to count for something. In a culture of public accountability ― which NASA had, and has ― people have to take responsibility for their work.
Transparency in both triumphs and setbacks is the way in which every American maintains their ownership in the mission, and it provides mutual accountability between Americans and space explorers.
By contrast, when private industry takes over the manned space exploration game, their catastrophic accidents can be hidden or regarded as an unfortunate condition of reaching profitability.
For the past 40 years, NASA has worked with the challenges of a comparatively tiny budget and the restrictions of aging technology pushed to, or past, its limits. Imagine what it could do if better funded and allowed to embrace some of the most successful traits of the private tech sector today.
America's identity ultimately rests in its citizens' embracing ideas ― those about freedom, which manifest themselves both in the rights we take for granted and the risks our explorers have taken for decades. Our economy is powered by ideas. Let's boost both by recommitting to our country's space program.
Ben Boychuk (bboychuk@manhattan-institute.org) is associate editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal. Lisa Schmeiser (lschmeiser@gmail.com) is a business and technology writer in California. She is filling in for Joel Mathis who is recuperating from surgery.