Good Riddance to Moondoggle Redux

February 4, 2010

The Obama administration’s decision to ditch George W. Bush’s return-to-the-moon plan has enraged congresscritters, neoconservative chest-thumpers, NASA bureaucrats, and the aerospace industry’s corporate-welfare queens.

Good.

Since it was announced in January 2004, taxpayers have spent $9.1 billion on Bush’s “Vision for Space Exploration.” The new rocket (Ares I) and capsule (Orion) created to keep NASA in the manned-spaceflight game after this year’s decades-overdue retirement of the space shuttle? Behind schedule and over budget -- results that anyone who follows NASA in a casual manner could have predicted. The heavy-lift rocket (Ares V) needed to send astronauts to the moon, as well as the lunar lander (Altair)? Not under construction.

NASA officials once boasted of putting boots back on the dust of Earth’s only natural satellite as early as March 2017. What planet were they living on?

The White House is shoving Bush’s entire scheme out the closest airlock, and deferring decisions about moon missions far off into the future. Oddly, the president, no friend of the private sector, has embraced the contracting-out of transportation services for the (mostly U.S.-funded) International Space Station. He plans to extend the federal government’s commitment to the orbital outpost, but send astronauts and cargo to and from the ISS on rides provided by corporations such as Space Exploration Technologies.

Killing lunar journeys and purchasing space-ferry services aren’t popular with the people who benefit from the astronaut-oriented portion of America’s expensive and unproductive astro-bureaucracy.

Obama’s shift “begins the death march for the future of U.S. human spaceflight,” says U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL), whose state -- coincidentally, to be sure -- is home to the Marshall Space Flight Center, which manages the Ares I and Ares V programs. Former NASA administrator Michael Griffin, on whose watch Bush’s moonshot took form, thunders that the change “means that essentially the U.S. has decided that they’re [sic] not going to be a significant player in human space flight for the foreseeable future.”

What hogwash. For the first time since Yuri Gagarin slipped the surly bonds of Earth, non-government entities are making serious efforts to put people in space. And most are based in the United States.

Virgin Galactic will soon send tourists on suborbital flights from a spaceport in New Mexico. (Its vehicles are built in California.) Las Vegas hotel magnate Robert Bigelow has put two inflatable test habs in orbit, and plans to lease larger modules to individuals and governments. In Texas, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is building a reusable rocket modeled after a highly successful military prototype that NASA assumed control of -- then wrecked -- in the 1990s.

“Space is a place, not a government program,” the mantra of pro-capitalism space enthusiasts, is lost on the trapped-in-the-1960s types who think only NASA can send humanity toward the stars. What the agency’s apologists fail to grasp is that Apollo, the New Frontier-era project they revere and can’t get past, was never a gutsy expression of high-tech American exceptionalism. It was a centrally planned Cold War stunt.

Were it not for the worldwide competition between the governments of the U.S. and U.S.S.R., astronauts would not have walked on the moon. Confirmation of this truth arrived in 2001, when the John F. Kennedy Library released audio of a White House recording from 1962.

Apollo, an exasperated JFK declared, involved “fantastic expenditures” that “wrecked our budget.” It could only be justified “because we hope to beat them, to demonstrate that starting behind, and we did, by a couple of years, by God, we passed them.” But an earlier remark cut the deepest for the naïfs who had always viewed Kennedy as an advocate for mankind’s American-led exploration of the cosmos: “We shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I’m not that interested in space.”

The same can’t be said for NASA bureaucrats, many of whom remained on the payroll long after Apollo 11’s success, and even after the Cold War fizzled. What’s worse, they managed to scuttle the humblest attempts by the for-profit sector to intrude on “their” turf. In a statement made several years before NASA threw a tantrum over Russia’s sale of tourist stays at the ISS, ex-administrator James M. Beggs averred that the agency “in many ways, has obstructed commercial space activities instead of encouraging them.”

Obama’s new approach still lavishes subsidies on NASA. That was to be expected. But in cancelling Bush’s moon madness and pledging to make the federal government buy -- not operate -- transportation systems, the president has taken one small step toward wiser space policy.

D. Dowd Muska is a writer, commentator and lecturer. His website is www.dowdmuska.com.

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