THIRTY YEARS OF INEPTITUDE
KOLKER, ROBERT G. OLER, RICHARD & WHITTINGTON, MARK
THIRTY YEARS OF INEPTITUDE Time to Rescue Space Exploration from NASA By Robert G. Oler, Richard Kolker, and Mark Whittington WHAT IF IT HAD HAPPENED LIKE THIS? It's July 20, 1969. Man has just...
...Some NASA officials even boast that for every dollar spent, nine or ten—some have even claimed fifteen— dollars go back to the federal treasury...
...By 1999, that system will require $4 billion a year to fly about four times a year...
...The space station is a pointless and fantastically expensive digression from its original mission...
...Lockheed promised that after the demonstrator was built, it would pay for and build the new space shuttle, which would have required Lockheed to find customers for it...
...Since 1984, the purpose and design of the station have been vastly scaled down, resulting in the incomplete version we now have hanging around in low earth orbit, which only began to get off the ground in December 1998...
...What is troubling is that many in the GOP who have poured scorn, justly, on plans for a national health care system ignore their own free market principles when it comes to human spaceflight...
...If Cronkite had made that prediction, saying in effect that the American space program would go backward instead of forward, would we have believed him...
...Multipliers of this nature require proof of value enhancement to be credible...
...Already in 1982, NASA began to shift from research and development (where risk is an acceptable factor) into "operations" (where risk is minimized) for the simple reason that a bureaucracy requires constant funding and legislators are reluctant to shut down operational programs...
...But after almost 20 years of flying the space shuttle, not a single significant scientific or medical process has been discovered or perfected in space...
...The Challenger disaster in 1986 ended NASA's role as a launch provider...
...These failures, however, teach an important lesson: The effort to reach new frontiers may be supported by government, but it can only be carried out by free enterprise...
...The possibility of success in such ventures has always been the catalyst for change in the technological and cultural history of this country...
...it may successfully go into orbit—or explode...
...Which is how Congress, which tried to foist the plan onto NASA, saw it...
...Not even the private sector contractors working under NASA seem to know anything about "freedom" or "enterprise...
...So, American customers turned to European companies for launching services...
...Even if it had cost twice as much and taken twice as long as predicted, it would have cost less than the country has spent, on average, in two years on NASA's space station...
...Imagine a space platform launched into orbit by privately operated vehicles and Americans transported to and from the platform on those same vehicles...
...Only two of the almost 40 main parts have been installed, while the station's total costs, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, have ballooned to over $100 billion...
...ISF would not have been manned, but it would have been visited by shuttle and monitored from the ground...
...Over the next five years America will junk the rockets that took it to the moon...
...But what really doomed this idea was that ISF would have been owned and run by Space Industries...
...In their place it will build a shuttle system that is more expensive to operate...
...No significant product of any kind has been produced in space...
...He is spending his own money...
...Government didn't take the airplane, microcomputer, and satellite communications from mere curiosities to everyday necessities...
...The station has not yet carried out a single scientific experiment...
...The station's main mission, at that point, will be merely to put two Americans in low earth orbit...
...This should have been a welcome opportunity to research the manufacture of various types of drugs, chemicals, and alloys...
...So now, Sen...
...In almost 20 years, neither the space shuttle nor the space station has accomplished a single thing promised...
...Imagine now a federal space policy that actually encouraged free enterprise...
...He is not asking for government loans...
...Teets has no intention of putting his firm or his stockholders at risk, but he is comfortable risking taxpayers' money...
...So in and near Dallas, Texas, he has assembled a team and is building a brand new rocket that will cost a little over $200 million— peanuts by NASA standards—to develop...
...True, but if Lockheed's vehicle, like the shuttle system before it, fails to meet its goals and cannot attract customers, then the American taxpayer, not Lockheed, will pick up the tab...
...Unfortunately, the strong possibility of being shown up by the private sector and a desire to protect its turf led NASA to resist the ISF plan...
...A teary-eyed Walter Cronkite turns to the camera and says, "This is the way it will be for American spaceflight in the next 30 years...
...As it turns out, the rockets that took us to the moon were scrapped...
...Free enterprise with modest government support could mean the difference between the failed space program we have now and the great space explorations of tomorrow...
...By 1982, the NASA shuttle was the only way to launch satellites from the United States...
...Lockheed wants the government to insulate it against the consequences of a business failure...
...Meanwhile, its missions have been reduced to only one and the completion date is well into 2005...
...The ones who lose are Beal and the team he has assembled for his project...
...would most certainly have seemed a travesty to the America that first threw its cap over the wall of space...
...And yet, transferring the space program from Robert G. Oler, Richard Kolker, and Mark Whittington are senior policy analysts for the Clear Lake Group, a space policy research organization in Houston, Texas...
...By contrast, businessman Andrew Beal has decided that there is money to be made in launching communications satellites...
...the bureaucratic precincts of government to the creative instincts of the private sector has not even begun...
...But by then, most of its customers (including other government agencies) were already heading for the door anyway...
...There is no balance between risk and reward here...
...Beal is not asking for taxpayers' money...
...Instead, as we celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of man's landing on the moon, the "space age" is just about over...
...And so, every year, without fail, NASA gets its money, makes new promises, and proceeds to break them...
...Just as contracts to carry the mail anchored the fledgling airlines of the early part of this century, government contracts could anchor the launch industry of the next...
...Technically this is not very radical stuff 40 years after humans first flew in space...
...The taxpayers are not short a dime...
...NASA routinely hints that it is going to discover cures for dreaded diseases or produce some miracle alloy that will revolutionize our society...
...The shuttle system that was supposed to fly 51 times a year when it was sold to the nation in 1972 will this year fly only 4 times...
...Jobs are spread out over many key states, and it is easy to claim that the "next mission" will do outstanding things...
...But since the new shuttle is, like the first shuttle 20 years ago, a high-technology, high-risk vehicle that has almost no chance of operating as cheaply or as often as promised, Lockheed decided it would be better if the government also got into the act of paying for the vehicle...
...In 1982, the press kit for NASA's third space shuttle flight predicted that by 1992 the shuttle would have flown over "400 times carrying payloads for military, scientific, and private industry customers...
...President Reagan proposed the space station in his State of the Union address of 1984, using NASA's assumptions that it would cost $8 billion, make possible major discoveries in eight fields of science, and be completed by 1992...
...Like the space station, the space shuttle system has been crippled by NASA's incompetence and big-government mindset...
...John Breaux of Louisiana is pushing a bill, the Space Launch Cost Reduction Act, that would create loan guarantees for Lockheed's work on the new shuttle...
...The space shuttle system is almost a complete failure...
...By July 1999, there will be no date set for the station's completion, and $100 billion will still be needed to finish it...
...NASA's space program has only ruined industries and handicapped national policy...
...Beal's rocket may or may not work...
...That NASA and its favored contractors have only their own interests at heart is not surprising...
...VentureStar (Lockheed's name for its space shuttle) is for all intents and purposes corporate welfare held together with pork barrel politics...
...Peter Teets, president and CEO of Lockheed Martin, wrote in a June 21, 1999, letter to Space News that these loan guarantees "do not directly obligate government dollars...
...NASA, like other customers, would simply have leased space on it for government functions...
...America does not have a national airline, has turned away from a national health care plan, and today looks to privatize schools, air traffic control, and half a dozen other government functions...
...Beal has determined that the risk is worth taking...
...The station Space Industries proposed to build and put into space, the Industrial Space Facility (ISF), would have allowed the shuttle to "drop off" experiments for long periods of time and then retrieve them...
...That we should now flinch from saying, Unleash the can-do spirit and bring on the glory of new frontiers...
...Furthermore, the servicing of satellites, once the shuttle's raison d'etre, has been abandoned...
...After Challenger, it was possible for American companies to offer launch services, but by then the profitable business of carrying communications satellites into orbit was dominated by overseas companies...
...In the meantime, American companies have been shut out of the market for satellite-launching service...
...But with an endless supply of tax dollars, NASA simply morphed again...
...Had NASA been a business and the shuttle its product, it would have folded long ago...
...In short, Space Industries's ISF was an elegant solution to the problems that later undermined NASA's space station...
...The absurdity of NASA trying to provide regular services to private and government customers was universally missed—except by NASA's actual customers who found that NASA, though it offered its services at government-subsidized rates, could not deliver them frequently enough...
...By 1999, the entire American space program will have spent nearly $30 billion to put a pair of cans into orbit and call it a space station...
...But the cost was prohibitively high...
...Also in 1984, Space Industries, a company in Houston, Texas, headed by former astronaut Joseph Allen, found a way to put up a space station that would produce benefits in just a couple of years...
...Certainly not...
...NASA's complete failure to make any progress in its scientific work is all the more remarkable because so few people seem to be shocked by it...
...Lockheed Martin was awarded the contract to build the X-33 demonstrator for the proposed new space shuttle...
...Economically, it would be revolutionary...
...We are faced with a choice between summoning a better future and prolonging a mediocre present wrought by an incompetent NASA monopoly...
...And yet, we continue to keep civilian space operations under NASA, one of the most dysfunctional government agencies going...
...It creates new infrastructure that spontaneously multiplies, generating jobs that produce wealth...
...And if Beal fails...
...Today, NASA provides launch services only to itself and its international partners on the space station...
...That brought home an important truth about the American space program: NASA opposes what it doesn't run and own...
...Man has just landed on the moon...
...NASA does it all the time...
...When we reached the moon just seven years after President Kennedy threw America's hat over the wall of space, most Americans envisioned this as the glorious beginning of an era in which we would be utterly changed by our ability to explore the heavens...
Vol. 4 • July 1999 • No. 42
