Will Private Enterprise Destroy Human Spaceflight?

The question above may seem audacious, but in view of the Wall Street meltdown that has dragged the world into the Great Recession, it is worth asking.

President Obama, channeling the Republican right wing and with the enthusiasm of a new acolyte, urges us to trust private enterprise to save the aims of spaceflight hitherto entrusted to NASA.

Some say that American industry has the expertise. Who, they ask, actually builds our spaceships but companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin?

It is hard to argue against the fact that private enterprise has the expertise to build the hardware needed for spaceflight. The point is, however, that, private enterprise doesn't have the will to build the hardware needed for the most ambitious goals of human spaceflight.

Added to that is the recent record of private enterprise, which is far from infallible. Boeing, that much-vaunted icon of private aerospace, is more than two years behind on the Dreamliner. After making promise after promise, Boeing may have to pay billions in "make good" or compensatory payments as a result of numerous delays.

Boeing has also apparently made the wrong call on the Boeing 747-8 Intercontinental, whose orders lag far behind those of the Airbus A380.

Cumulatively, this is a mistake that may cost Boeing tens of billions of dollars in lost sales.

Boeing is a monopoly in the manufacture of large commercial airliners in the United States, having opportunistically assimilated its last remaining rival, McDonnell Douglas, in 1997. The premier commercial airliner manufacturer just a short while ago, Boeing is now falling behind Airbus, the European consortium, which until the last decade was a distant second in both orders and manufacturing.

Defense manufacturers such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin (the largest defense company in the world) have incurred billions in cost overruns over the years. Lockheed Martin's F-35 is derided as overbudget and underperforming, and even as a jack of all trades and therefore master of none. Even the F-22 Raptor, easily the best fighter aircraft in existence, was terminated by the Obama Administration partly on the basis of cost.

As I think upon it, the so-called "efficiency" of private enterprise rarely fails to incur jocularity. Prior to the Great Recession of this date, the self-avowed greatness of Wall Street should have yielded similar mirth. Much to the detriment of the world, the joke that is Wall Street is now much more tragic than not.

The economy was nearly destroyed by Wall Street greed and the machinations of private enterprise. The question now becomes, can NASA be far behind?