Mudita Journal

Government in Space

February 1, 2003 · Filed under: Current Events, Objectivism, Politics
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After the nation’s respects have been appropriately paid, it is time to re-open the case for getting government out of the space industry.

Even if one cannot grasp the inappropriatness of spending billions on taxpayer-funded trips into space, there is plenty of evidence that government-controlled bureaucracy kills astronauts.

For instance, Roger Boisjoly (the engineer who pleaded with NASA subcontractors in 1985 to correct problems with the boosters) later wrote the following of the circumstances leading up to the Challenger explosion:

You may have already concluded that the Challenger disaster was the result of only the decisions made during the evening prior to and the day of launch. As a senior engineer involved with the SRM’s since July, 1980, and specifically with the joints since 1981, I can make the following statements from personal observations.

The SRM Program at MTI was suffering from the lack of proper original development work and some may argue that sufficient funds or schedule were not available and that may be so, but MTI contracted for that condition. The Shuttle program was declared operational by NASA after the fourth flight, but the technical problems in producing and maintaining the reusable boosters were escalating rapidly as the program matured, instead of decreasing as one would normally expect. Many opportunities were available to structure the work force for corrective action, but the MTI Management style would not let anything compete or interfere with the production and shipping of boosters. The result was a program which gave the appearance of being controlled while actually collapsing from within due to excessive technical and manufacturing problems as time increased.

The shuttle program is becoming the Taggart Transcontinental of space.

There is no inherent reason why space exploration couldn’t proceed along the same lines as Shackleton’s original exploration of the Antarctic, which was funded solely by interested private investors.

I’m sure somebody will be all over this in the coming weeks and months.

UPDATE: Fox News has an article examining NASA’s problems and the possibility of increased private sector involvement:

Aerospace experts say money and staffing are not the sole problems NASA faces. The agency also needs to change its philosophical underpinnings.

The United States should “take a hard look at NASA’s future, in regards to new technologies and more modern systems,” said Alan Ladwig, a former NASA administrator of policy and planning.

In the 1990s, NASA turned over day-to-day management of shuttle operations to a private contractor, Houston-based United Space Alliance, a joint venture of Rockwell International and Lockheed Martin. The move prompted many complaints from NASA employees who asked for more government oversight of the agency.

But others say funding and oversight will not fix NASA’s problems. Rather, a more effective strategy would be to create a smaller research lab to test various technologies, then to send the research out to the private sector to expand upon.

“Unless a new policy is put in place that encourages that creativity rather than, by implication, discourages it by saying NASA is the only entity empowered to do these sorts of things with competence, then we will never have practical access to orbit,” said aerospace engineer and policy consultant Charles Lurio.

“What we need is the Model-T for space. We don’t know who’s going to invent that. What we need is research to enable that not to be stuck on a single track,” he said.

InstaPundit reminds us that he has Congressional testimony on the subject as well.

More important dissent (via Drudge) on NASA, this time from an engineer who worked for NASA for 36 years:

‘But when I tried to raise my concerns with Nasa’s new administrator, I received two reprimands for not going through the proper channels, which discouraged other people from coming forward with their concerns. When it came to an argument between a middle-ranking engineer and the astronauts and administration, guess who won.

Searching for the right quote from Atlas Shrugged to fill this space….

Ed Hudgins from TOC has a moving tribute to the Columbia astronauts, and comments as well on the importance of privatizing space travel:

The station has been criticised for huge budget overruns. Construction costs were capped by the US Congress at US$25 billion, but to complete it as planned would cost US$30 billion. A new shuttle could cost US$6 billion, money that NASA doesn’t have.

A new and radical approach to men in space will likely be needed, not because we want to retreat to our caves, not because we want to turn our backs on what it is to be human, but because we want to progress, because we want to open space to all mankind the way aircraft opened the skies.

I couldn’t agree more.

UPDATE (5/14/03) – NASA is now admitting that there were “missed signals” in their handling of the Columbia space mission. My favorite quote in this article is from Senator John McCain, who became angry at assertions that there was not one person who was responsible for making these mistakes: “Those decisions aren’t made by machines,” McCain said. “Some one is responsible.”

UPDATE (7/23/03) – MSNBC has published an excellent story today summarizing the dilemma NASA currently faces. Here’s the final paragraph:

This obsession with after-the-fact justification of the decisions—or the lack of required decisions—that led to the loss of the crew is a bad omen for the imminent clash with the Gehman Committee’s diagnosis of what is wrong inside NASA’s culture and what must be fixed. Fixing something requires knowledge that it is broken, whether it’s a spaceship wing, or a space culture. NASA’s shortsightedness in not recognizing how badly broken Columbia was gave them no chance to fix it, and seven people died. Officials at NASA seem equally unable to see what’s broken about their own culture. Until they recognize it, it’s equally unlikely they’ll be able to fix that flaw, either.

UPDATE (8/26/03) – FoxNews.com summarizes the Investigation Board’s detailed report about the causes of the Columbia disaster:

A flawed NASA culture is to blame for the Columbia shuttle disaster and more tragedies will happen without changes to the space agency, according to a scathing 200-plus-page report released Tuesday.

Members of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) (search) released the detailed report, completed late last week, after spending seven months probing the technical facts of the space tragedy and interviewing scores of engineers and other space workers to attach the fundamental blame.

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