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Publicly Funded Competition For NASA?
Wigs writes: "There's a nice article on spaceprojects.com about NASA's current competition, or rather the lack of it. From the article: 'The Microsoft antitrust litigation, as well as the consumer benifits resulting from AT&T's break-up, have substantially raised public awareness about the negative impact that monopolies can have on society. Many people who know much about NASA distrust it as well ... It seems NASA would benefit from having publicly funded competition, resembling what Japan's two competing civilian space agencies have.' I've heard that companies like United Space Alliance have looked into the possiblity of purchasing a shuttle, but have been shot down by NASA officials. Other companies looking to get into the single stage to orbit competition are Rotary Rocket, Kelly Space, and Pegasus (actually 3-stage). However, these are all private companies. This article discussing public funding, namely the National Science Foundation."
Basically, the idea of the omnibus legislative reform was this:
While NSF is one of the more obvious agencies that should have its own space program, just about any agency you can think of has some justification for engaging in some activity in space. Indeed, it makes more sense to move the Office of Commercial Space Transportation into it's own agency and disperse NASA's existing funding and programs to a wide variety of and Federal agencies for their own space activities than it does have a "space program" or even two "space programs".
Space isn't a program. It's a frontier.
Not only did we fail in this more ambitious legislative reform, we discovered that NASA was flagrantly violating our "successful" legislative reform, PL101-611 -- the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 (requiring NASA to procure launch services only from the private sector) -- and no one in either the executive branch nor in Congress cared enough to take effective disciplinary action against NASA when the NASA inspector general's office failed to do so. This despite the fact that the intent of PL101-611 was both executive policy, initiated under Reagan (carried on under Bush), and public law. Similar flagrant violation of law greeted the grassroots Launch Voucher Experimental Program when it was passed.
In retrospect, the basic problem has been that people believed political action was the way to affect change in the US government's monopoly on frontiers.
It isn't.
The problem is the US government.
The US government prevented Russia from offering their launch services at the most competative prices it could afford because the US government wanted to protect its pet "big 3" launch companies, McDonnell Douglas, General Dynamics and Martin Marrietta -- this at a time when the US government was decrying the potential abuse of underemployed Russian rocket technologists by "terrorist states" with money, and was trying to create make work programs for them to keep them employed under US funding.
This situation is now changing, which is a very healthy sign -- finally Russia may be able to make some hard cash by putting the US government and the EU in their respective places when it comes to orbital launch systems.
But if you, a nerd, really want to contribute to affecting change yourself, I have one thing to say to you:
Change the tools and you change the rules.
Seastead this.
In science, the competition is doing a lot of damage. Scientists compete to publish their articles, if somebody hears about what others are doing, some will rush to publish it before others do, and the consequence is that scientists keep their ideas and working plans secret as long as they can, with a huge loss for scientific progress as a result.
What we need is rather cooperation. People need to give up their egos in the name of scientific progress, something that should be encouraged by funding agencies (those are the mechanism that drives the unhealthy competition).
As for the space race, it wasn't the competition that made it so successful, it was that they threw so enormous amounts of money at it. If that kind of funding was provided for science today, it would have been a different story alltogether.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I think NASA's glory days are over. For the last three decades they've pretty much been coasting on the Apollo program success, the shuttles notwithstanding (which were conceived at the height of their success anyway). They've done little remotely innovative since then.
The ESA operates on very different principles. From day one they were more of a commercial venture rather than a prestige program. Of course, part of the reason for that was that they knew it was futile to try to outspend the Americans. Europeans are notoriously reluctant to spend money on big technology without the prospect of ROI. I'm sure exceptions exist, but as a rule that's pretty true. So the ESA has slowly chipped away at the commercial satellite market, and unbeknownst to most, they're now the largest satellite launcher in the world. The fact is, until we start mining asteroids or what have you, satellites are the only lucrative space business.
My feeling is that--like Airbus--the ESA will fairly quietly work away at it, until one day they'll just happen to be the number one player (ok, so Airbus hasn't been that quiet really, but the ESA certainly has). I think one key element of that success will be the development of SSTO technology. I've been reading the ESA web pages (in particular DASA), and more than NASA almost they seem to be under the impression that SSTO will be the only way to REALLY make money in the long run. They view the Ariane launchers as strictly a short-term money making technology, but nothing to base the future on.
Basically, until we can literally take off into space from a runway and return with the exact same vehicle, space travel will still be in its infancy and considered brute force technology. The longer we fool around with concepts like the Venture Star, which fights the atmosphere every step of the way into orbit, instead of taking advantage of it, the longer it will take to REALLY get into space.
The United States was founded on the principle that everyone should be able to do whatever they want, and that the government shouldn't be able to do a damn thing about it. I have every BIT as much right to veto a bill as our President does, I don't have a SPECK less justification than the Atomic Energy Commission does for building breeder reactors, and I have every DROP as much privilege to assassinate foreign leaders as the CIA does. I should be able to shut down restaurants for health violations, decide who is mentally competent to stand trial, and set environmental regulations, and so should you!
One mayor per city, one congressman per district, one governor per state, one president per nation: it's an absolute, monopolizing terror. So when the time comes to vote this November, don't let the instructions fool you into marking only one box. Competition's the name of the game: mark them all!
Thank you.
Bruce
Bruce
You are the real Bruce Perens.
In addition to the private ventures mentioned, here are some others:
CFFC
JP Aerospace
Microcosm
Pioneer Rocketplane