FYI,

"Do We Need NASA?"
News.com
http://www.news.com/Do-we-need-NASA/2009-11397_3-6211308.html

: The birth of modern aviation probably lies in Charles Lindbergh's
: 1927 flight across the Atlantic, which won him a $25,000 prize and
: a ticker-tape parade down New York's Fifth Avenue.

: By showing the world to be just a little smaller than before,
: Lindbergh fathered the 20th century's transportation revolution.
: The airship named after German entrepreneur Ferdinand von Zeppelin
: took its maiden flight the next year, and by the early 1930s both
: Boeing and Douglas were selling passenger planes to fledgling
: airlines including TWA, United and American. Not long afterward,
: the famous Douglas DC-3 made transcontinental flights practical.

: Compare the rapid progress in aviation with America's experience in
: space travel. Fifty years after Sputnik 1's launch in October 1957,
: mankind has set foot on precisely one other world (a moon, at
: that), the space shuttle has at best a 1-in-50 chance of disaster
: upon each launch, and a completed space station is still a few
: years out. Since the last moon landing 35 years ago, in fact,
: mankind has not ventured beyond low Earth orbit again.

: The difference? Critics say it's the National Aeronautics and Space
: Administration. Aviation's youth and adolescence were marked by
: entrepreneurs and frenetic commercial activity: Lindbergh's
: trans-Atlantic prize money was put up by a New York hotel owner,
: and revenue from the airlines funded the development of the famous
: DC-3. The federal government aided aviation by paying private
: pilots to deliver air mail.

: Space, by contrast, until recently has remained the domain of NASA.
: Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer famous for building a suborbital
: rocket plane that won the Ansari X Prize, believes NASA is crowding
: out private efforts. "Taxpayer-funded NASA should only fund
: research and not development," Rutan said during a recent panel
: discussion at the California Institute of Technology. "When you
: spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build a manned spacecraft,
: you're...dumbing down a generation of new, young engineers (by
: saying), 'No, you can't take new approaches, you have to use this
: old technology.'"

: Rutan and his fellow pilots, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs
: have undertaken a formidable task: To demonstrate to the public
: that space travel need not be synonymous with government programs.
: In fact, many of them say NASA has become more of a hindrance than
: a help.

: From moon landings to freight hauling

: Soon after its creation in the 1950s, NASA captured the hearts of
: America's youth with vistas of outer space and other worlds,
: illustrated by unforgettable moments like Buzz Aldrin and Neil
: Armstrong setting foot on the moon.

: But by the late 1990s, the agency seemed to have become more
: moribund than innovative. In 1999 alone, NASA lost the Mars Climate
: Orbiter (because of English-Metric unit conversion problems) and
: Mars Polar Lander (likely because of a programming error). Then,
: after spending $1.6 billion on space plane research, NASA abruptly
: abandoned the project.

: Late that year, NASA's problem-ridden Hubble Space Telescope was
: offline for more than a month. And NASA shuttle launches seemed to
: have devolved into repair missions and transportation for science
: experiments. Its mission, in other words, seemed to be shifting
: from historic accomplishments to the more matter-of-fact business
: of freight hauling.

: The shuttle had become so problematic that Time Magazine published
: an article titled: "The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped." It
: dispassionately listed the shuttle's failings: It was intended to
: be an example of American technological prowess; instead it is
: fragile and antiquated (until recently the flight deck computers
: used 1978-vintage 8086 microprocessors). It was supposed to be
: flown every week; instead it flies a few times a year. It was
: supposed to cost $5 million a flight; instead it costs a staggering
: $1.3 billion a flight.

: NASA leadership also discouraged private space travel.
: Then-administrator Dan Goldin publicly disparaged millionaire
: Dennis Tito's choice to pay a reported $20 million to fly to the
: space station on a Russian spacecraft, calling the former NASA
: scientist "un-American" for doing so. A few years earlier, though,
: NASA had flown a lawyer and insurance executive named Jake Garn and
: Bill Nelson--who had become influential members of the U.S.
: Congress--on space shuttle missions. Also during Goldin's tenure,
: NASA also took steps to block entrepreneurs at Russia's MirCorp
: from being able to use Russian supply rockets or gain access to a
: key tether that could have helped to keep Mir aloft.

: But the Commercial Space Act of 1998 eliminated the long-standing
: prohibition on bringing vehicles and people back and forth from
: space and opened the door to what would become the commercial space
: industry of today. (Six years later, the federal government
: formally gave approval for Rutan's SpaceShipOne to launch a
: suborbital flight in pursuit of the X Prize.)

: Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation and a
: private space entrepreneur, says NASA can remain relevant--but only
: by focusing on what for-profit companies won't do. "NASA should be
: in focusing on breakthroughs in propulsion systems. They should be
: taking very high risks, funding things that are likely to fail
: because that's what government should be doing, pushing the
: envelope," he said in an interview with CNET News.com.

: For its part, NASA says it's moving in that direction, pointing to
: policy directives including one from 2005 decreeing that the
: agency "will normally procure launch services for NASA and
: NASA-sponsored primary payloads from commercial providers."

: "We're trying to get out of this low Earth orbit business," said
: Ken Davidian, program manager for NASA's Centennial Challenges
: program. "If there are commercial suppliers of space capabilities
: like launch vehicles for cargo delivery, we're required by law to
: use them. We want to use them. The premise is that those services
: will be cheaper to buy than to use ourselves."

: Is NASA worth $17.6 billion next year?

: But if private industry can reliably transport people and cargo to
: space, is it still necessary to funnel $17.6 billion a year to
: NASA? Or could that money be better spent on, say, tax breaks to
: encourage the development of a world-class private space industry?

: "One way is to have a vibrant private sector model so people can
: see that space is a place, not a government program," said Ed
: Hudgins, executive director of the free-market-advocating Atlas
: Society and editor of the book Space: The Free-Market Frontier.
: "It's a place where you can do science, you can do work, you can
: explore, you can live. None of those functions are uniquely
: government functions."

: Other free-market advocates call for a "phase out" of NASA, meaning
: privatization of the space station and enforcement of an existing
: restriction on not using the shuttle to carry cargo that can be
: handled by private launches. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
: California, a largely autonomous part of NASA that's managed by the
: California Institute of Technology, could continue unmanned
: planetary probes, and so on.

: That would reduce the risk of recurring budget overruns--which
: happened not just with the shuttle program, but the space station
: as well. It was originally supposed to cost $8 billion, have a crew
: of 12, and be complete by the mid-1990s; now it has a crew of three
: and is expected to cost at least $130 billion when it's finally
: finished in 2010.

: Politically, though, NASA privatization isn't likely anytime soon.
: The Bush administration has asked for NASA's budget to be increased
: to $17.3 billion for the 2008 fiscal year, which the
: Democrat-controlled House of Representatives upped last month to
: $17.6 billion. Much of the extra money would be spent on the space
: station.

: "We're going to be relevant in the things that commercial can't do
: -- all the exploration stuff," said Davidian, the NASA program
: manager. "We're going to push the boundaries out and hopefully
: commercial industry will be back-filling...so NASA can keep pushing
: out further." Another area would be sending signals to the
: investment community, he added.

: One change is that Michael Griffin, NASA's administrator since
: April 2005, seems less hostile to the private sector than his
: predecessor. In a speech last month, he recited NASA's current
: goals, including the Ares rockets and the Orion crew vehicle. Then
: he extended this olive branch: "This is the exploration work to be
: done over the next 10 to 15 years, and I hope to entice
: international and commercial partners to be part of turning these
: ideas into reality."

: Instead of privatization, a more modest form of legislative
: tinkering might be tax incentives. One federal bill from 2005, the
: Zero Gravity, Zero Tax Act, would create a 25-year tax moratorium
: on profits derived from space manufacturing. A more radical
: proposal would create an X Prize-like corporate tax reward: the
: first company to erect a base on the moon (or Mars) would be immune
: from all taxes for the duration.

: "Ideally I want to move to a world without NASA," said Hudgins,
: editor of the private space travel book. "For the same reason we
: don't have a world with the Western Settlements Bureau of the
: federal government. There's no need for one. The West has been
: settled, and it was mostly settled by private individuals getting
: out there through private means. The frontier is the model for
: becoming a space-faring civilization."

Mark Reiff