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By Robert Garmong
web posted October 11, 2004
Last Monday SpaceShipOne, the first privately funded manned spacecraft, captured the ten-million-dollar X Prize by making its second trip to outer space in less than a week. In doing so, it did more than shatter the boundary of outer space: it destroyed forever the myth that space exploration can only be done by the government.
Earlier this year, a Bush Administration panel on space exploration recommended that NASA increase the role of private contractors in the push to permanently settle the moon and eventually explore Mars. But it appears that neither the Administration nor anyone else has yet considered the true free-market solution for America's moribund space program: complete privatization.
SpaceShipOne rockets into space over the Mojave desert October 4 There is a contradiction at the heart of the space program: space exploration, as the grandest of man's technological advancements, requires the kind of bold innovation possible only to minds left free to pursue the best of their thinking and judgment. Yet by placing the space program under governmental funding, we necessarily place it at the mercy of governmental whim. The results are written all over the past twenty years of NASA's history: the space program is a political animal, marked by shifting, inconsistent, and ill-defined goals.
The space shuttle was built and maintained to please clashing constituencies, not to do a clearly defined job for which there was an economic and technical need. The shuttle was to launch satellites for the Department of Defense and private contractors--which could be done more cheaply by lightweight, disposable rockets. It was to carry scientific experiments--which could be done more efficiently by unmanned vehicles. But one "need" came before all technical issues: NASA's political need for showy manned vehicles. The result, as great a technical achievement as it is, was an over-sized, over-complicated, over-budget, overly dangerous vehicle that does everything poorly and nothing well.
Indeed, the space shuttle program was supposed to be phased out years ago, but the search for its replacement has been halted, largely because space contractors enjoy collecting on the overpriced shuttle without the expense and bother of researching cheaper alternatives. A private industry could have fired them--but not so in a government project, with home-district congressmen to lobby on their behalf.
There is reason to believe that the political nature of the space program may have even been directly responsible for the Columbia disaster. Fox News reported that NASA chose to stick with non-Freon-based foam insulation on the booster rockets, despite evidence that this type of foam causes up to eleven times as much damage to thermal tiles as the older, Freon-based foam. Although NASA was exempted from the restrictions on Freon use, which environmentalists believe causes ozone depletion, and despite the fact that the amount of Freon released by NASA's rockets would have been trivial, the space agency elected to stick with the politically correct foam.
It is impossible to integrate the contradictory. To whatever extent an engineer is forced to base his decisions, not on the realities of science but on the arbitrary, unpredictable, and often impossible demands of a politicized system, he is stymied. Yet this politicizing is an unavoidable consequence of governmental control over scientific research and development. Nor would it be difficult to spur the private exploration of space--it's been happening, quietly, for years. The X Prize was just the tiniest hint at the incentives for private groups o break out of Earth's atmosphere. The free market works to produce whatever there is demand for, just as it now does with traditional aircraft. Commercial satellite launches are now routine, and could easily be fully privatized.
But all this private exploration is hobbled by the crucial absence of a system of property rights in space. Imagine the incentive to a profit-minded business if, for instance, it were granted the right to any stellar body it reached and exploited.
We often hear that the most ambitious projects can only be undertaken by government, but in fact the opposite is true. The more ambitious a project is, the more it demands to be broken into achievable, profit-making steps--and freed from the unavoidable politicizing of government-controlled science. If space development is to be transformed from an expensive national bauble whose central purpose is to assert national pride to a practical industry, it will only be by unleashing the creative force of free and rational minds.
We have now made the first steps toward the stars. Before us are enormous technical difficulties, the solution of which will require even more heroic determination than that which tamed the seas and the continents. To solve them, America must unleash its best engineering minds, as only the free market can do. Robert Garmong, Ph.D. in philosophy, is a writer for the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, Calif. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. Send comments to . Copyright © 2004 Ayn Rand® Institute, 2121 Alton Parkway, Suite 250, Irvine, CA 92606. All rights reserved.