(I just watched “Orphans of Apollo“, and it primed me for this rant.)
I keep seeing people make this mistake. Stephen Colbert and Neil DeGrasse Tyson made it, Florida politicians make it, and now a bunch of astronauts have signed an open letter to President Obama that makes it.
NASA does not equal Space. Space does not equal NASA.
More specifically, NASA is not America’s only way to get people into space.
Back to that letter. Quoting:
America’s greatness lies in her people: she will always have men and women willing to ride rockets into the heavens. America’s challenge is to match their bravery and acceptance of risk with specific plans and goals worthy of their commitment. NASA must continue at the frontiers of human space exploration in order to develop the technology and set the standards of excellence that will enable commercial space ventures to eventually succeed. Canceling NASA’s human space operations, after 50 years of unparalleled achievement, makes that objective impossible.
See the mistake? Canceling NASA’s human space operations won’t stop America’s men and women from riding rockets into the heavens. All they need to do is buy a ticket from Virgin Galactic, or SpaceX, or XCOR. All of which are American vehicles, designed and built in the US of A. And then there’s Russia, Chinese, Japan, the ESA, and India, all of whom would likely be glad to fly Americans and American cargo into space.
You know how people lament “Where’s my flying car?” We should be lamenting “Where’s my PanAm shuttle to orbit?” or “Where’s my vacation on the moon?”
That was what NASA should have been doing during those 50 years of “unparalleled achievement”. Developing those technologies they promised us!
What did we get instead? The Space Shuttle. Commercially useless at a billion bucks per launch, and a turnaround time measured in months. Compare that to an airplane, and you can see how NASA has wasted our time and money. I could weep.
So, slowly, finally, we’re starting to get a commercial space industry that’s focused on commercial viability, not on whatever NASA’s priority is. (My opinion: they’re a government bureacracy, focused on keeping their jobs, so they literally cannot create a space transportation system that takes fewer than 30,000 people to operate. )
Now it’s time to get NASA out of the business of transporting cargo and humans into space, and refocus them on what they do best. Big, grand, nearly impossible tasks like expanding humanity into the solar system. We need to know how to live on other worlds. We need to know how to get there. We need an infrastructure to support us, like climbers on the way to the summit of Mt. Everest need a base camp, and supply caches, and maps, and guides. NASA can build all of these things – if it stops messing around with uneconomical rockets and blowing its budget on things that private industry can do far cheaper and faster.
This is exactly what the Obama administration is advocating. Good for them for listening to their advisors and taking an unpopular stance.
NASA has failed us by not developing economical transport into orbit. We need to get NASA out of the way of American engineers and entrepreneurs, and let them get us into orbit. And focus NASA on the big, not-yet-commercial exploration and development tasks that only NASA can do.
Edit: Searching for something else, I found this PBS Radio transcript of a quick story featuring my personal hero and role model, Jeff Greason. He also thinks this way. In fact, I probably got it from him. He was on the Augustine Commission.
