Obama's Space Plan — a Conservative Argument

MarkWhittington writes "The Obama space proposal, which seeks to enable a commercial space industry for transportation to and from low Earth orbit while it cancels space exploration beyond LEO, has sparked a kind of civil war among conservatives. Some conservatives hate the proposal because of the retreat from the high frontier and even go so far as to cast doubt on the commercial space aspects. Other conservatives like the commercial space part of the Obama policy and tend to gloss over the cancellation of space exploration or even denigrate the Constellation program as 'unworkable' or 'unsustainable.'"

Comments

libertarian

[TheSHAD0W]

Coming from a different point than conservative or liberal - NASA has always been a huge waste of money and ought to be deprecated. Getting private industry into the act is a good thing, in my opinion, although I'm not so sanguine about government subsidies. Also, while low Earth orbit may not be as grand a vision as going to the Moon, or Mars, or the asteroid belt, it's a good starting place of all of the above; let's get some infrastructure up there and we'll be able to go wherever we want.

Re:libertarian

[FooAtWFU]

I'd like to hear about this purported 15% productivity boost which high-speed passenger rail would supposedly bring us. Last I heard about those studies, it was something like this regarding California's high speed rail...

The rail authority assumes that between 88 million and 117 million people will ride the trains each year. To put that in perspective, consider that the entire annual ridership of the Amtrak system, which includes 21,000 miles of routes and more than 500 destinations in 46 states, is less than 29 million. Amtrak's high-speed Acela Express service, which runs from Washington, D.C., to New York City to Boston, serves a larger and denser market than the planned California system and only commands a ridership of a little more than 3 million passengers a year.

http://reason.org/news/show/california-voters-were-railroa

Okay, okay, that's the Reason Foundation talking, and we know they're a bunch of libertarian loonies. But what about someone more sympathetic?

Even the pro-high-speed-rail California Rail Foundation found the project lacking, with its representative telling senators, "We can't believe any of the numbers presented in the business plan."

http://www.sacbee.com/politics/story/2484870.html

Re:libertarian

[Teancum]

Why don't government contracts count as private sector?

What is missing here is the source of the R&D and how the rockets are being paid for. Most, nearly all of the rockets that NASA uses have been built and designed on what is called a cost-plus contract. In other words, all of the risk, all of the effort, and nearly all of the hard decisions were made by government employees. This is why government projects can go hugely over budget (including the Constellation program I might add) as the companies involved already have their profit in place. That is the "plus". Any costs that occur are held by the taxpayers, including performing major redesigns along the way.

I should add one more issue to consider with a pure "government contract": Any design is exclusive to the government and simply may not be used for any private citizen... at least not without a significant Act of Congress that explicitly permits its use elsewhere. In the past, there were investors who wanted to buy a couple complete Space Shuttles and had even found financing to build their own vehicle assembly building and launch pad facilities. They were simply told "No", they couldn't have them regardless of the price. It was exclusively the domain of NASA and NASA alone in terms of people going into space.

For something in the "private sector" to be genuinely in the private sector, the private company bears all of the R&D risk, all of the cost considerations, and the "government" is merely one of several different customers. That is the huge difference here, where these companies are quoting a figure, and are paid for delivery of goods. This is the huge difference between what has been offered in the past and what is offered now.

Under cost-plus contracts, there is absolutely no necessity to lower the cost of getting into space. Performance is the only driving issue, and if the project can be completed before the end of the current presidential administration. The Apollo mantra was "waste anything but time". That still, unfortunately, holds true even today including on the Constellation program, at least that is how it was operated.

Companies now have a legitimate reason to drive down costs with flat cost transportation services. A price is set, and companies can either make a bid to offer services or pass on the idea if they think it is to expensive. Competitive bidding may even start happening here, but more specifically if a company can drive down operations and development costs, that brings in extra profit to that company. The incentive to drive down costs is much more pronounced in this kind of purchasing environment.

That is the difference. If you or those supporting Constellation can't figure that one out, I can't help you any further.