Destroying NASA in Order to Save It

Many who may be inclined to support the so-called "privatization" of space take the view that private enterprise will find a way to get to space much more cheaply than any government program possibly could.

If so, then I have one question: Why hasn't it already?

Some may mention with pride the accomplishments of Virgin Galactic, for example. Shouldn't they and the successes of Bigelow Aerospace be seen as harbingers of a new era?

To the extent that private enterprise has ventured into spaceflight, it is, in the case of the collaboration of Scaled Composites with Virgin Galactic, in large measure because NASA did it first -- with billions of dollars of research and development (R & D) and decades of effort having already been invested.

Virgin Galactic, however, didn't need money from NASA. Why, then, deprive NASA of funding for Project Constellation on the pretext that private enterprise needs it?

To take the libertarian viewpoint, the private enterprise model really doesn't need public funding for the objectives it has it mind.

And those objectives have nothing to do with the objectives that, until now, Constellation has served. Those objectives are far loftier, far more ambitious, and far more compelling than space tourism. They are also far riskier and far more expensive. Sending human beings more than 200,000 miles away to land on the Moon is orders of magnitude more complex than sending a tourist vehicle on a ballistic trajectory or, in the case of SpaceX, even sending cargo capsules to the ISS.

The key is to realize that Project Constellation was, in essence, the ultimate R & D effort, and it served the same function that NASA's original Mercury-Gemini-Apollo programs did on a much vaster and interplanetary scale. Terminating the Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo programs would have made it much more difficult, if not impossible, for the SpaceX's of the world to exist today. Likewise, to the extent that it is terminated, the R & D toward Constellation's implementation that would give rise to future versions of SpaceX would no longer exist.

The new budget for NASA effectively terminates the ultimate R & D program on the very rationale that R & D should be increased. Apropos of an era in which Afghanistan is turning into a Vietnam, Obama is destroying NASA in order to save it.