American civil space policy has been in turmoil since February 2010, when the Obama administration clumsily rolled out its new plan for NASA\u2019s human spaceflight program along with its budget announcement. The new plan cancelled Constellation, the program intended to carry out President Bush\u2019s 2004 goal of returning to the Moon by 2020, a goal that a blue-ribbon review panel had pronounced unrealistic under available budget constraints. The new plan also required NASA, after the already scheduled retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, to rely on the private sector to deliver its astronauts to low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station, just as it has been doing for satellites for years. And the new plan emphasized the development of technologies that would enable a potential return to the Moon sooner than the failing Constellation plan \u2014 as well as open up the rest of the solar system to affordable human access.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The political reaction has been, to put it mildly, bizarre. Some conservative members of Congress, who would normally be expected to defend private industry against a large government bureaucracy, have instead attacked it. For example, Senator Richard Shelby (R.-Ala.) denigrated private space companies as mere \u201ccommercial hobbyists\u201d \u2014 even though that category includes multibillion-dollar firms with decades of space-launch experience, like Boeing. Meanwhile, the Obama administration, which has hardly been shy about intervening in and remaking entire sectors of the economy, has in this one instance declared its intention to outsource a longtime government function to the private sector. As one space policy analyst put it, \u201cDemocrats don\u2019t think that capitalism works within the atmosphere, and Republicans apparently don\u2019t think it works above it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This political confusion raises the question: What would a genuinely conservative space policy look like? To answer this, one must first understand the history of the U.S. manned spaceflight program \u2014 how it got started on the wrong foot, and how it is now shaped more by pork and prestige than by actually accomplishing useful things in space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Sputnik launch in 1957<\/a> was the single greatest determinant of early U.S. space policy decisions \u2014 decisions that have continued to resonate for the past half century and affect plans well into the decades ahead. The little beeps coming from that Soviet satellite, heard by amateur radio operators the world over, seemed to toll an ominous warning to a complacent nation. Back then, to be a conservative meant, among other things, to fiercely oppose the existential threat of Soviet communism \u2014 and to be willing to take almost any action to contain or defeat it. In response to being beaten into space, the U.S. government quickly accelerated its own space efforts. Partly as a propaganda ploy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established NASA in 1958 as a purely civilian space agency to demonstrate that, unlike the Soviets, American civil space activities would be peaceful, and cleanly separated from military pursuits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For its first three years, NASA was a small agency of ad hoc programs with limited goals. But John F. Kennedy made the issue of the \u201cmissile gap\u201d with the Soviets a cornerstone of his campaign, and when he came into the White House in 1961 he determined to make space a major Cold War battleground. In May 1961 \u2014 a month after the stinging Bay of Pigs fiasco, as well as another shocking Soviet achievement, the first man in space \u2014 Kennedy made his commitment<\/a> to landing a man on the Moon, in part to distract from those events. So we had a space policy that urgently sought a victory in a crucial war of international prestige \u2014 an eminently conservative objective. Unfortunately, it was almost perversely unconservative in design. In order to defeat a state-socialist enterprise, we ourselves set up something resembling one: a hugely funded government space agency. Although we wanted to disprove the Kremlin\u2019s continuous bluster about the inherent superiority of socialism, the great irony of space history is that we created a massive, centralized, command-and-control agency to get the job done. The space race pitted a democratic regime against a totalitarian regime, but it would be inaccurate to say that it pitted a free-market approach against a statist approach \u2014 for both countries\u2019 approaches were quite similar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Of course, the failure to craft a space policy more in keeping with America\u2019s tradition of free enterprise is completely understandable given the political exigency of the moment, with the nation and its leaders panicked in the midst of an international gladiatorial battle. But this initial mistake was compounded again and again. First, during the Apollo era, the United States ratified the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which essentially declared all areas off the planet \u2014 that is, almost the entire known universe \u2014 immune from claims of national sovereignty. The United States was eager to sign on to such a treaty partly to slow the escalating cost of the space race, and also to avoid the risk of having the Soviets claim the Moon if they managed to get there first. And while the treaty does not explicitly forbid the private ownership of assets in space, it fails to positively establish a system of property rights, and its denial of territorial sovereignty in space complicates future efforts to establish such a system. Industry, order, and prosperity depend upon property rights; by essentially rejecting them, the treaty forsakes a fundamental American principle. As a result, the development of space has been stifled.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Also, the U.S. space program very quickly became high-quality pork. As vice president and later president, Lyndon Johnson was determined to use the program to help industrialize the South, not unlike what the Tennessee Valley Authority had done during the Great Depression. NASA opened centers of high-technology jobs in Florida, Alabama, Virginia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and, of course, Johnson\u2019s home state of Texas. (Historian James C. Bennett has pithily described<\/a> the space program as a \u201cMarshall Plan for the Confederacy.\u201d) There is no \u201cnatural\u201d location, for instance, for a mission control center \u2014 but when Rice University offered up the land for such a facility in Johnson\u2019s home state, it became a done deal, and soon Houston\u2019s Johnson Space Center (as it is now known) was born.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since that time, numerous opportunities to create a space policy more in keeping with American values have been passed up. Instead, the Apollo program was succeeded by programs in the same government-centric mode: the space shuttle and International Space Station, both of which have utterly failed to meet their stated goals of making access to space affordable, safe, and routine, and providing a stable site for performing valuable science in low-Earth orbit (the worth of which has always been oversold, relative to other federally-funded science). The reason for these failures is simply that, while those were the stated<\/em> purposes of the shuttle and space station, they were not the politically relevant<\/em> purposes of those programs. No one was fired and no one lost an election just because those goals went unmet. As long as the jobs continued, the rest didn\u2019t much matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n