While President Obama’s recently released FY 2011 budget is drawing mixed reaction from the public, for space buffs the reaction is clear enough. The president has eliminated funding for an ambitious NASA program that would return humans to the Moon and set the stage for eventual flights to Mars in favor of investment in private space technologies. While this major program change is a step in the right direction, it does little to fix NASA’s fundamental problems and lack of direction.
As a self admitted space enthusiast, part of me is sad to see my chance of witnessing a moon landing slip away. My economic side is less upset – the current government space program is a very costly endeavor that results in very poor bang for the buck when it comes to innovations and “spinoffs” that result. The soon-to-be defunct moon plan, driven by the agency’s vague goal of “exploration,” would have continued this tradition and used resources that could be better allocated elsewhere.
While Obama has thankfully cut this vestige of Bush II’s presidence from NASA’s agenda, his solution is not much better. NASA will actually see an increased budget, much of which will go to maintaining the long-delayed International Space Station and funding private companies to provide space vehicles to service the outpost. Ultimately, the station is likely to be as cost ineffective and unnecessary as the cancelled moon program.
The president’s budget ignores one key fact – gone are the days when a burgeoning private industry relied on NASA to fund technologies that would help launch a value-added satellite industry. The current private trend is the development of vehicles for space tourism (mostly for the rich), a sector that seems to be doing well. Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic service is planning the first commercial flights into space for sometime in the coming years. And numerous other entrepreneurs are laying out plans for space training, orbital flights, and even space hotels.
The growing commercial space industry is hardly one that suffers from market failures that would merit massive government funding, especially when those resources would be put to technology designed to reach another NASA boondoggle. And as history has shown, the next president could reverse course in another few years, causing further waste of billions of dollars.
Obama and space policymakers would have been well advised to take a giant leap and cut out NASA’s manned spaceflight program altogehter, returning the funds back to the American public where some of them could be invested in private space travel. Of course, such thinking may have just been too bold for the agency that sent humans to the moon 40 years ago.
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