"Rockets to Outer Space" Not Mentioned In Constitution

At American Spectator, Iain Murray and Rand Simberg love space, but don't see why space exploration needs to be centrally planned. Excerpts:

There's something about space policy that makes conservatives forget their principles. Just one mention of NASA, and conservatives are quite happy to check their small-government instincts at the door and vote in favor of massive government programs and harsh regulations that stifle private enterprise. It's time to abort that mission.

Loren Thompson, writing in the Forbes Business in the Beltway blog, recently suggested that President Obama's space policy represents the "end of the road" for U.S. manned space flight. Yet Thompson is simply repeating a defense of pork barrel politics that would play well in Huntsville or Houston. Moreover, his claim that President Bush had a plan that "might have one day carried astronauts to Mars," while Obama's version is "a science fair that literally goes nowhere," misrepresents both plans….

On its cost and schedule trajectory, Constellation would have created a gap of at least seven years—until 2017 at the earliest—during which we would have had to continue to purchase Soyuz launches and capsules from Russia, to use for crew changeouts and as lifeboats for the International Space Station. This is particularly ironic, because under the Bush plans, the ISS itself would be abandoned two years earlier, in 2015!

On the other hand, with the new plans, U.S. involvement with the ISS will continue until at least 2020 (and probably beyond). New commercial capabilities to deliver astronauts both to the station and to low-Earth orbit for exploration beyond would become available no later than 2015 (and probably earlier), at a small fraction of the cost of the planned Constellation rocket: the Ares I launcher and Orion crew capsule.

The new NASA plan would make those capabilities available not just to a few NASA civil servants, but to all comers, including private space researchers and sovereign clients (foreign governments) that have signed memoranda of understanding with Bigelow Aerospace to lease its planned orbital facilities, independent of the ISS. 

The U.S. will thereby become a seller of human space transportation services, instead of a supplicant to and purchaser of them from Russia….

When Thompson writes that "those U.S. 'entrepreneurs' needed billions of dollars from the federal government to develop rockets based on old technology before they could take over from the Russians," we can only shake our heads sadly. 

First, there is no reason for the scare quotes around "entrepreneurs." Space Exploration Technologies has invested hundreds of millions of its own money to develop its Falcon launcher and Dragon capsule, scheduled to fly next month, for a tiny fraction of the projected cost of Ares/Orion. SpaceX has a huge backlog of orders. In fact, to meet its ISS obligations as soon and cost effectively as possible, NASA needs SpaceX and other commercial crew providers more than SpaceX needs NASA…..

It is time for conservatives to recognize that Apollo is over. We must recognize that Apollo was a centrally planned monopolistic government program for a few government employees, in the service of Cold War propaganda and was therefore itself an affront to American values. If we want to seriously explore, and potentially exploit space, we need to harness private enterprise, and push the technologies really needed to do so.

Space enthusiast Katherine Mangu-Ward noted the final flight of Discovery here at Reason Online with a well-curated mix of past Reason writings on that ol' final frontier.

And Richie Havens sings Bob Dylan, warning us that "moon" and "doom" almost rhyme, and that there's a reason for that!