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SpaceShipOne,
the first privately-funded manned spacecraft, did more than shatter the
boundary of outer space: it destroyed forever the myth that space
exploration can only be done by the government.
Just a week earlier, 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.
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 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. The so-called X Prize, for which SpaceShipOne is
competing, offers incentive for private groups to break out of the Earth's
atmosphere.
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 filosofy, is a writer for the
Ayn Rand Institute in
Irvine, CA. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of
Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
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