No Liftoff for These Space Flights of Fancy

Robert Zimmerman: No Liftoff for These Space Flights of Fancy

Both parties excel at feigning interest in space exploration for the purpose of justifying pork to their districts.

By ROBERT ZIMMERMAN

On July 18, the future of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration became all too clear. Forget journeys to the stars. Space exploration is now clearly tethered to the earthly desires of politicians. The result is that America's incoherent space program is unable to accomplish anything except spend money the federal government doesn't have.

We saw the process at work in budget negotiations in the House, where politicians divided along partisan lines in the vote over NASA's budget. The Democrats and NASA were pushing to fund a proposed asteroid mission, whereby an unmanned spacecraft in 2018 would capture an asteroid, and bring it closer to Earth so that astronauts could visit it in 2021. This mission was created by NASA to fulfill President Obama's 2010 commitment that the U.S. send humans to an asteroid by 2025.

Not surprisingly, all 17 Democrats on the House Science committee voted for this budget plan.

But the Republicans in Congress don't want NASA to capture an asteroid. They want to reactivate George W. Bush's proposal from 2004 that was canceled by Mr. Obama in 2010. President Bush wanted humans go back to the moon and use that as a springboard for going to Mars. All 22 Republicans on the committee voted against the asteroid mission.

Each party claims that its proposal is the best way for the U.S. to lead the way in exploring the solar system. Neither of these plans will ever get off the launch pad.

The pattern has repeated itself over the past four decades. A president, whether it is Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush or Barack Obama, makes a Kennedy-like declaration about America's next major goal in space. Sometimes it is building a space station by the end of the decade. Sometimes it is going to the moon by some set date. Sometimes it is going to an asteroid.

Congress and the president use the announcement as a justification for sending pork to their districts, and steer a little money to the project to get it going. When the really big funding is needed to actually build it, however, these politicians chicken out. The way NASA has been designed—by these same politicians, and with numerous facilities in as many congressional districts as possible—makes building anything by NASA ungodly expensive, far more expensive than even our most spendthrift politicians can stomach.

So they cancel it. A new president makes a new declaration and new goal, and the cycle begins anew. The pork rolls out, a new project begins, some money gets spent, and nothing gets built.

That's what happened with President Reagan's space station, Freedom, in the 1980s. After a decade of spending billions on blueprints, the project was unceremoniously canceled by Bill Clinton. Similarly, we spent about $9 billion on President Bush's moon-bound Constellation program, only to have President Obama cancel it. Now we have Mr. Obama's asteroid mission, opposed by Republicans who still want to send Americans to the moon.

Both parties, however, are in agreement about one thing. When President Obama canceled Constellation, Congress stepped forward to demand that NASA continue to build some variation of Constellation's rockets and Orion capsule. Thus we now have the Space Launch System, or SLS, a heavy-lift rocket for launching the Orion capsule and tons of other material beyond Earth orbit, supposedly capable of sending astronauts either to the moon or the asteroids.

Both parties in Congress want SLS because that is the pork for all their space dreams. SLS, costing a minimum of $3 billion per year, also uses as much of the leftover infrastructure of the space shuttle as possible, which means the thousands of NASA employees and contractors who operated the shuttle will continue to have jobs.

This is why Republican Sens. Orrin Hatch and Bob Bennett, both of Utah, were so happy when they helped force Space Launch System approval through Congress back in 2010. The SLS was required to use some version of the space shuttle's solid-rocket boosters—whether this made engineering sense or not—and those boosters were built in Utah. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R., Texas) and Bill Nelson (D., Fla.) also celebrated SLS's passage, as the project would maintain otherwise no-longer-needed shuttle jobs at the Johnson Space Center in Texas and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

When it is finished, the Space Launch System is expected to launch only once every four years, with a total cost per launch of about $14 billion. This is only the launch cost—including the annual operating expenses as well as the amortized cost of designing and building the rocket and capsule—and does not include the cost for any missions. Again, that's $14 billion per launch, almost equal to NASA's entire annual budget. And the launches will only happen once every four years.

The good news is that the SLS will never fly. When it comes time to actually finance the actual missions, Congress will once again balk. SLS will get canceled, the next president will step forward and make a new proposal, and the whole pork-laden process of waste will begin anew.

In other words, what both parties are really doing is faking a goal for the purpose of justifying pork to their districts.

If these politicians really cared about our country, they could focus instead on doing things that would actually foster the creation of a healthy and robust aerospace industry.

They would go back to the model that Congress used back in the 1920s and 1930s in trying to jump-start the aviation business. Congress didn't dictate what airplanes to build or missions to fly. Congress needed the U.S. mail delivered, and hired airplane companies to deliver it. These companies were then able to use the profits earned from those government contracts to upgrade their airplanes and sell those improved products to others besides the federal government. The result was a robust aviation industry serving millions of private customers, with the needs of the federal government quite trivial in comparison.

Similarly, the federal government needs to get cargo and humans to the international space station. It should buy those services from companies like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada and Orbital Sciences ORB +0.79%. These companies have already been developing space ships and rockets for one-tenth of the cost of the Space Launch System. For example, the entire cost to develop, build and launch SpaceX's Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 rocket was about the same as NASA spends every year trying to design the Space Launch System. Similarly, Orbital Sciences developed the Antares rocket and Cygnus capsule for as little.

So get the politicians and the bureaucrats out of space exploration. Leave it to these private companies and the citizenry. Not only would we get our rockets and spaceships for a price we can afford, we would end up having a potent private industry in space, competing for business and taking Americans where they want to go, efficiently and freely.

Mr. Zimmerman writes about space history and science at his website, Behind the Black. His 1999 book "Genesis: The Story of Apollo 8" has just been released in an e-book edition.