The GOP’s Non-Existent Space Policy
In light of the recent loss of our nation’s greatest space hero, I decided to take a gander at the Republican Party platform to see what they had to say about space and NASA. Here it is:
America’s Future in Space: Continuing this Quest
The exploration of space has been a key part of U.S. global leadership and has supported innovation and ownership of technology. Over the last half century, in partnership with our aerospace industry, the work of NASA has helped define and strengthen our nation’s technological prowess. From building the world’s most powerful rockets to landing men on the Moon, sending robotic spacecraft throughout our solar system and beyond, building the International Space Station, and launching space-based telescopes that allow scientists to better understand our universe, NASA science and engineering have produced spectacular results. The technologies that emerged from those programs propelled our aerospace industrial base and directly benefit our national security, safety, economy, and quality of life. Through its achievements, NASA has inspired generations of Americans to study science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, leading to careers that drive our country’s technological and economic engines.
Today, America’s leadership in space is challenged by countries eager to emulate — and surpass — NASA’s accomplishments. To preserve our national security interests and foster innovation and competitiveness, we must sustain our preeminence in space, launching more science missions, guaranteeing unfettered access, and maintaining a source of high-value American jobs.
So there’s the preamble. Next come the specific policy proposals, right?
Well, one would think so, but one would think so in vain. That’s it. That’s the sum total of what the GOP platform says about space.
This was clearly written by someone who has given very little thought to space policy, probably some staffer who was told “Hey, we need to say something about space. We know that Mitt doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about it, but we have to say something.”
So he (or she) did a little research and came up with this “motherhood” statement (as in space is good, motherhood is wonderful). Note all the conventional and unexamined assumptions:
Space is about exploration. Check.
Space is about science. Check.
NASA is our space “program.” Check.
NASA spending advances our industrial base. Check.
NASA promotes STEM education (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). Check.
Our preeminence in space is key to our national security interests. Check.
What isn’t mentioned? Well, for one thing, the platform is bereft of the slightest mention of military space, when it (not NASA) is in fact key to our national security, given what a force multiplier things like GPS, communications satellites, surveillance systems, etc. can be. Similarly, there is no mention whatsoever of all of the private space activity, some of which is being spurred by the (uncharacteristic) policy of the current administration to competitively procure services from that sector. Will a Romney administration and Republican Congress continue this? One would never guess it from the platform wording.
There is no discussion, or even consideration, of space as a new venue for human activity, whether economic (e.g., mining) or actual settlement, despite the fact that a number of companies have been formed recently for the former, and part of their business plans are to enable the latter.
The Space Frontier Foundation is similarly unimpressed:
NASA seems to be one Big Government program many Republicans love. The GOP platform criticizes the federal government as “bloated, antiquated and unresponsive to taxpayers” but has nothing but hackneyed praise for NASA, and doesn’t even mention the increasing role of the private sector. The authors of this platform must imagine they still live in the Cold War of the 1960s, when only governments launched payloads and people into space.
The platform committee declares it “isn’t enough to merely downsize government, having a smaller version of the same failed systems,” that we need to “do things in a dramatically different way” — yet says nothing about the need to reform NASA or to streamline regulation of the emerging NewSpace sector. Republicans call themselves the Great Opportunity Party. Yet their Platform presumes “space” is a (government) program, instead of a frontier to be opened to the American people – the greatest “opportunity” since the West was settled.
In the last eight years, the private space industry has taken off — literally. Companies like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada are vying to take crew and cargo to the International Space Station. Others are testing vehicles for suborbital space tourism, or planning orbiting space facilities and asteroid mining. Many inside NASA recognize that the agency should be encouraging these NewSpace companies by buying their services, rather than competing with them, so NASA can focus on true exploration–like Lewis and Clark. NASA needs the kind of overhaul Gov. Romney has brought to other dysfunctional organizations if it is to pass his test for all government programs: is it worth borrowing money from China to pay for it? Only when NASA ceases to be a white-collar jobs program and starts nurturing entrepreneurs in new industries will the answer be yes.
A few months ago, when he was using the issue to bash Newt Gingrich for his vision with respect to the next frontier, I had some questions for Mitt Romney (which he has never thought worth answering). Presuming that the Republican platform plank on space will be adopted as his own, I now have some new ones.
1. As president, will you aggressively support NASA’s Commercial Crew Program to minimize the time during which we are reliant on Putin’s Russia to get our astronauts to the space station?
2. Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin is supposedly on your team of advisers for space policy. During the debates, you said that if anyone proposed building a lunar base, you would “fire them.” Griffin’s policy and plans were to do exactly that. When are you going to fire him?
3. Have you or your campaign staff read the Augustine Committee report from 2009, which explains why the Mike Griffin approach is unaffordable and unsustainable? Are you aware that, despite this, Congress has chosen to continue it under a different name, on a bipartisan basis, wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on rockets that NASA doesn’t need for space exploration just to maintain jobs in their states and districts?
4. Do you believe that NASA, as it evolved during the Cold War and as currently constituted, is the best federal instrument to advance our civil space goals, or do you think that, half a century after the first American in space, it’s past time for a major overhaul of federal space policy?
5. At Bain Capital, you were a champion of Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction,” a redeployment of resources from value-subtracting activities to value-adding ones. Have you considered the degree to which our space policy is ripe for such an approach, particularly given the nation’s fiscal straits?
Finally, do you believe, as implied by the platform, that the the purpose of space activities is for “exploration,” or do you think that exploration is merely a means to an end — space development? As a bonus question, have you considered the possibility that, as Utah was for your ancestors, space could ultimately be a new frontier offering religious and other freedom, and a last resort should the Founders’ noble experiment fail here on earth?
Perhaps you should.
Well, first of all a “military” space program is the province of the military, not NASA, which was created by Eisenhower specifically as a civilian space agency. Admittedly, mainly to blunt Soviet propaganda about “Imperialistic American warmongers militarizing outer space”, i.e. the fact that Explorer was a U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency program, and Vanguard was a U.S. Navy program.
NASA’s role in military space applications has always been rather limited, basically consisting of launching satellites for the Defense Department. That’s as it should be, and I don’t expect it to change anytime soon. Other military space projects should be carried out by the military specifically, for security reasons as much as anything else.
As for Romney’s lack of interest in space, Obama’s consists of “Muslim outreach” and propagandizing for AGW.
Even a total lack of a plan is better than a stupid and counterproductive one. Which is all The One and his cronies have to offer.
Romney will probably let the space program be run by… the actual people doing the work. (After first firing James Hansen & friends, I suspect.) Which means that what gets done will be decided by the ones who actually know what is feasible, as opposed to political hacks with pseudo-Utopian “agendas”.
Which is exactly what NASA needs. Even if it includes a general housecleaning of the executive ranks. Which, come to think of it, is something Romney knows how to do, if his track record in the private sector is any indication.
cheers
eon
I wholeheartedly agree with that, plus don’t forget to strongly encourage private civilian space enterprise.
Which is the real key to success. NASA has two actual purposes in existence. First, to develop technologies for the U.S. Aerospace Industry (take a look at the NASA Tech Briefs website sometime). Secondly, to support scientific space exploration (mostly unmanned). Industrial space exploitation (I know, that’s a dirty word) should be the province of the private sector, with the Government playing no more of a role than the FAA.
NASA has not launched a military satellite in at least 20 years. They did launch some from the Shuttle in the 1980s. Following the Challenger accident, President Reagan told NASA to get out of the satellite launching business. Since NASA was being reembursed only a tiny fraction of the cost of flying a Shuttle mission, it made economic sense. At that point, the Shuttle became a vehicle in search of a mission.
There were several satellites still on the Shuttle manifest that would’ve cost too much to modify to fly on conventional rockets and they were launched on the Shuttle after Challenger. I think the last of the military ones was launched by 1990.
True, but the majority of the Navstar GPS satellites went up from the Cape;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_GPS_satellite_launches
While they were launched from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station on Merrit Island, the Station relies on the NASA complex for logistics support. And since GPS is a dual-use system (military and civilian), it counts.
cheers
eon
Actually, it’s the other way around. NASA satellites are launched by private companies like ULA (United Launch Alliance). They use the Air Force Eastern Test Range and facilities on Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. NASA doesn’t launch anything for itself since the Shuttle retired.
Also, GPS is a military system, bought and paid for. NASA had nothing to do with it. The government allowed civilians to use GPS based on a 1983 decision, followed by the 2000 decision to remove selective availability.
Just because something flies in space and is American, it doesn’t mean that NASA had anything to do with it. NASA has done many things such as pioneering communications satellites technology, earth resources monitoring, scientific investigations, weather satellites and the like. But it had nothing to do with GPS. It doesn’t count.
Not going to happen. Romney is not going to be a new broom cleaning up. His first 100 days in office will be remarkable only for the number of people who are NOT fired, who should have been.
Oh, that and finding out that Obamacare really isn’t so bad after all, and we just need to tweak it a bit.
Mark, I sure hope you are wrong in your assessment. Millions of Americans will be sorely dissapointed with that kind of outcome.
The first order of business for the GOP is to save the country. Space will take care of itself as this first measure of importance evolves. Space is best conducted by private enterprise and so NASA would be well advised to start looking in that direction, once the socialist appointees are dumped.
The whole GOP platform is fluff like the excerpt above, all 65 pages of it. It’s like the GOP saw what Obama did to win in 2008, all the generalities and vagaries, the platitudes, the blank slate the voter writes their hopes and dreams onto, and the GOP leadership said to themselves, ‘if that is what the voters want, that is what they will get’.
Political platforms signify little to nothing. Once elected, a president seldom feels any real obligation to put the party’s platform over his own agenda.
We’re broke. We already have powdered orange colored substance to mix with water and tell ourselves it’s orange juice. We already have ink pens that will write when held upside down. Most importantly, we already have private companies in the game using private money and employing private citizens.
Space exploration can wait until we start paying off our debts and not just servicing them with interest payments.
If we’re broke, it’s not because of NASA. NASA’s budget is tiny – oh, still more money than you or I will see in our lives, but compared to the military, infrastructure, CIA, or virtually any other government program it’s tiny. Reducing that budget won’t do diddly squat towards reducing our debt or balancing the budget. It’ll just mean that we’ll do even less worthwhile projects than we do now.
Seriously, if you want an example of easily-trimmable government bloat, look at the Navy. We currently have 12 full supercarriers; One (Enterprise) will be decommisioned at the end of the year, but three more are under construction.
With their escorting battlegroups, that’s roughly four times the firepower of every other navy in the world COMBINED. Oh, and the budget for ONE carrier battlegroup is greater than NASA’s.
We need a Navy, and a powerful one. I acccept that we need the new Ford-class ships, which will have capabilities the Nimitz-class lack. We DON’T need twelve of them.
Yes we do. 12 carriers means 4 on station, 4 in refit, 4 in overhaul. By extending deployments and cutting short refits, the Navy can effectively keep 5 to 6 carriers on station, but not for more than months at a time.
And they’ll need 3 to 4 carriers just to take care of Iran.
If we need more than ONE CBG to take on Iran, I would be very surprised. A single one of our old Ticonderoga-class cruisers could destroy their entire navy; and the Iranian Air Force is a bad joke, since nobody’s been willing to sell them modern fighters since the Islamic Revolution.
Now, what we WOULD need is a lot of troops to control the ground situation. You will note I said nothing about reducing the Army.
The NASA budget is approximately $18 billion. The federal government spends about $3500 billion each year. Compared to that, NASA’s budget just isn’t very important, about 0.5%.
Correction: $3700 billion a year. $3.5 trillion is what Ryan wants to bring it down to for starters. That’s the “draconian” budget of the mean Grandma killer Ryan
Thanks for the correction. Since the Senate hasn’t passed a budget in over 3 years, it’s hard to know how much the federal government is spending. On top of that, how much of the spending is off the books?
I’d love to see a law that required the federal government to live under the same accounting standards that the rest of the country has to follow. You’d see many, many federal officials going to jail.
Mainstream space policy is like other policies: act and play dumb.
The silence is deafening… Yet there is a lot of good data available for people who are willing to look.
If NASA’s mission is returned to space and aeronautics, rather than focusing on climate change and muslim outreach, it will be a vast improvement even if it doesn’t receive the priority it had in the 60′s.
If NASA’s mission is returned to space and aeronautics, rather than focusing on climate change and muslim outreach
NASA’s policy is not “focused on climate change and Muslim outreach,” despite idiotic rhetoric from the administration.
The problem is that currently NASA’s policy is not focused. There is not one goal, or even many goals that NASA is currently trying to attain. It is currently running on inertia. As the Onion headline so eloquently stated: “NASA puts man on bus to Cleveland”.
It’s really hard to have focus when you have no control. NASA has no continuing budget – every cent can be changed every budgetary year. And they’re both the President’s and Congress’ chew toy – any choice they make is subject to change without notice from Washington.
One day they have a mandate to put a man on Mars, the next they’re told to ignore manned flight in favour of probes. Given a mission takes years to plan and execute, is it any wonder they’ve given up on the big stuff?
Be careful about the extent that you advocate any single focused goal for NASA. In the past, this has caused NASA to be focused on single projects that then go over budget, and eat the funds needed to bring new technologies to flight status. This means that, while the highly visible project gets accomplished, the 50 technology developments needed to make spaceflight costs drop don’t ever get used. This means that technology creeps, and so does human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit, because it stays too expensive to sustain. This happened with Apollo, the Shuttle, ISS, and Constellation. It is now happening with the SLS/MPCV reincarnation of Constellation forced on NASA by the Congress.
When the Cold War propaganda victory of Apollo happened, you could make the argument that it was worth the cost of not developing the needed technologies, for a while. However, no such propaganda victory is needed today, …and we still don’t have a number of technologies whose development should have been restarted by 1970 at the latest, and been in use reducing human spaceflight costs by 1980.
Space will be truly opened up to Humankind not by government, but by private enterprise. Private enterprise wouldn’t THINK of quixotic though head-line grabbing pushes for Luna or Mars without establishing a solid foundation in L.E.O. first!
The tech of it: From L.E.O., longer-range expeditions wouldn’t suffer the exorbitant costs and physical challenges of boosting large craft out of the Earth’s gravity well, since craft could be assembled from components manufactured on orbitals combined with smaller Earth-made components which could be boosted in smaller, more efficient payloads.
The psych and bio of it: Since Humans will already live and work in L.E.O., those who get “space-sick” in either mind or body are eliminated before locking them in a cramped tin can with a dozen or more other Humans. In fact, space medicine in general will be much more of a known quantity.
i too believe that ‘for profit’ will drive the essence of the new space program. its $$ that makes the world go round, and as science progresses, so will space exploration. my favorite new space travel aid is the ‘space elevator’. a concept that lacks only some small scientific/technical tweaking to be doable (see science fiction author a.c. clark).
it may be some other breakthrough that propels us headlong into permanent occupation of our close mineral rich neighbors in space; however, whatever it is, it is bound to make a lot of people/countries rich, drive our science even further out into space, and put zillions to work.
of course, as already proven, socialism/marxism doesn’t lend itself to exploration, so much as constipation by a society. a new title for our poser in chief, the great constipator. he sure has our country blocked up looking for some relief.
See the surface and pictures from mars. Enjoy!
Curiosity first 360 Color Photo:© NASA JPL READ ABOUT
http://www.panoramas.dk/mars/curiosity-first-color-360.html
Completely agree this was a missed opportunity. They had a 62 page platform and they devote a paragraph of platitudes on space policy. NASA badly needs direction. They are gummed up by the “Senate” Launch system (SLS) and have no goal, no long term direction, no idea where we go from here. How about instead of blustering about ‘standing up to Putin’ we talk about cooperating with the world and getting great things done in space.
Why do we do business with the Chinese in EVERYTHING except the space program? If we teamed up with Russia, EU and China we could be on our way to Mars in 10 years. Why are we still in low Earth orbit? Why hasn’t NASA run a 2-3 year mission to ISS as a test for Mars (they are ‘debating’ whether to “try” 1 year missions)? Why aren’t the Republicans- the proponents of business- proposing to help commercial space? We saw what $1.2 Billion for COTS did! How about some free market solutions from the party of the free markets.
Space is important but not a primary priority.
Fix the economy stupid and the rest will flow.
First thing first!
The best hope here is that, similarly to Obama, a President Romney will ocntinue to not care much about space and stumble upon the right course because it provides splashy photo ops at bargain prices. Then Democrats will decry how we are dismantling the space program to fund big businesses and Republican donors like James McNerny (not sure if he’s a Republican donor, just making a point).
A lunar base?! The horror! The horror!