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

[cohensh]

Yes, because there is a shitload of private developed launchers that can bring cargo into LEO and beyond. Go libertarian!

SpaceX and Orbital immediately come to mind. Not to mention the Atlas rocket family.

Re:libertarian

[simcop2387]

well that's one thing where, even though I'd say I'm mostly libertarian, I'd disagree. getting infrastructure in place is one of the things that government can do easier and (if you can eliminate most of the pork and other bureaucratic shit) should be doing since it is one thing that most definitely does benefit all citizens equally, just imagine if the roads were done by private companies, there might be more that are very well maintained but something like the interstate highway system would be near impossible to create because you'd be so hard pressed to get the companies to actually cooperate in any reasonable manner. Funding NASA helps fund the research and development that allows for the possibility of creating that infrastructure we so desperately need up in space in order to do any of it. There are so few people that seem to realize that we are so incredibly far away from being able to mine the asteroid belts and things like that. And even so many years after the space program has started, there is not one company that can go into LEO to do the things NASA can do, simply because the returns aren't there in LEO to be profitable in the short or even medium term. Government does not have any business in morality but infrastructure is one place that it can really do a huge amount of good for the citizens and possibly the world (and our own economy if we get the infrastructure up there and charge others to use it)

Re:libertarian

[khallow]

How about 18 successful launches by the United Launch Alliance in 2009 (on the Delta II, Delta IV, and Atlas V platforms)? This includes several NASA and DoD payloads too.

Atlas doesn't count, it was designed by the US Air Force.

It was designed by Lockheed Martin.

Re:libertarian

[astar]

yah, the private banks do so well at giving us a future.

to go where ever we want, we need high-energy "rockets". Otherwise serious colonization does not work. In the 70s we were ready to go with nuclear drives. Now the russians are going to finally do it. I do not see a lot of private investment in anything really different. Pooh, we now all hear about the virtues of innovation, and as far as I can tell, this is something marketing is especially good at.

if you are a conservative type, something to consider is that India will be in LEO with men in 2012 and on rhe moon, with people, in 2020. oh, India is involved deeply with the russians on the nuclear drive.

on a more earthly thing, China currently has 64 high speed rail projects. 1000's of miles. The usa has 64 miles of medium high speed rail. Some people talk about high speed rail in the usa as capable of causing a 15% overall productivity increase.

and last I looked, 54 nuclear power plants were being built, almost all in asia. the usa has one, an old mothballed tva plant being brought up.

so who has the potential for a future?

anyway, here is a video entitled "the destruction of nasa" which is supposed to be very good

http://larouchepac.com/lpactv?nid=13392

Re:libertarian

[TubeSteak]

Getting private industry into the act is a good thing, in my opinion, although I'm not so sanguine about government subsidies.

Like the nuclear industry, who do you think is going to end up insuring private space flight?
Getting rid of government subsidies isn't nearly as easy as we'd like to think.

Re:libertarian

[QuoteMstr]

What private company do you expect to fund the GPL and send probes to the outer solar system? Or Hubble, for that matter?

Yes, reasonable people can argue that LEO launches are so routine these days that they should be turned over to private industry. Fine. But there are tons of other NASA programs that have no profit potential whatsoever, yet tremendously enrich humanity culturally and scientifically. Because private industry would never fund these programs, NASA must. And we're better off for it.

Re:libertarian

[TwoUtes]

Mod this parent up. U.S. industry is loathe to spend money on any R&D that does not have an immediate return on investment (read:shareholder gains). That is why there are not now and never will be manned private launchers entirely from the so-called 'private sector'. Too expensive for too little return. This new plan from the Obama administration doesn't change that one bit. The U.S. Treasury will still be spending the money to design and build a man-rated launcher. Instead of ATK, Lockheed, Boeing, etc. being the recipients of this largesse, it will now be SpaceX, Orbital Sciences, and others. Basically, the money has been diverted from large government contractors that have already been in the space business for a long time, to a bunch of newcomers. Same game, different players.

Re:libertarian

[langelgjm]

It was designed by Lockheed Martin.

I don't know the specifics of this case, but if it was designed by Lockheed Martin on a government contract, that's not an indication that it would have been feasible to do so in the private sector.

Re:libertarian

[Nyeerrmm]

You realize Boeing and ULA (a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed) are two of the primary contractors under CCDev, the precursor to a larger 'commercial' manned operation. Furthermore, SpaceX, Blue Origin, et. al. employ a large number of people who used to work at more traditional companies -- Boeing and Lockheed do not have experience, the people working for them do.

The difference in the game isn't that the money is going to different people, its how its being managed. Before, we were operating in the same way we did in Apollo, by telling companies what we wanted built, and paying significantly more when things didn't work out as cheaply as we hoped. This made sense in the 60s, since we didn't really know what it took to complete the task. However, after we have been launching people into orbit for 50 years, we should no longer be able to claim to not be able to predict the costs. So the difference here is that instead of funding development of vehicles, NASA is instead saying they'll be a guaranteed customer, and purchase rides at a fixed price from these companies. While this may seem like a fine distinction, it changes the incentive structure significantly so that programs are more likely to stay on time and on budget, proposals are more likely to be accurate, and congress is less able to meddle.

Costs for missions beyond LEO are harder to predict, so government directed cost-plus contracts may make sense in this regime -- however, they will be far more successful if there is a robust, reliable, multi-vendor infrastructure for getting people to and from LEO.

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.

Re:libertarian

[kklein]

I've been saying for 10 years or more: America is over. The image of America is really just the image of being the only large country that didn't suffer massive infrastructural damage in WWII. We were the only man standing afterward, and as a result, got to call a lot of the shots and also attract the best talent from around the world, and had a lot more money than others.

However, that "USA! USA!" image has ultimately undone us. Americans feel they are great because they are the USA, not that they should strive to be great because they are the USA. It's a bit like the student in the honors program at an American university I taught at, who was getting a solid B in my Japanese language class. He came to my office and with a straight face told me that because he was an honors student he needed me to change his grade to an A, because if he didn't get an A, he'd be out of the honors program. I suggested to him that the honors program was for people who got As, not that getting As was for people in the honors program. He didn't like that and stormed off. Then his advisor called me and chewed me out, saying "this kid is an A student!" "Um, not in my class he's not. He's doing pretty well, but not great. That's a B." This, I think, is the same confused thinking that holds the USA back. For a few decades it was able to skid along on the momentum of that head start in 1945, but without ever getting serious about any innovation or development, we're fading into irrelevance.

I'm pretty lefty (well, for the US--I live in Japan and here the same views make me right-of-center, as they do in most of the world--I consider myself a moderate conservative, but the US is so red-tinted that I look totally blue by comparison), so I have to point out that all of the projects you have pointed to are large-scale, publicly-funded projects. Most of the heavy R&D lifting anywhere has to be done with government funds, because you never know when the thing will be able to turn a profit. But if you do it right, it ends up creating lots of opportunities for the private sector to innovate around what the people have paid for, and that benefits everyone. Americans, with their (sorry) idiotic Ayn Rand Reaganite Libertarian mindset continually pat themselves on the back for their rugged individualism and individual responsibility for things that were gifts to them by the intelligent use of collective funds. That isn't to say that the private-sector doesn't innovate and doesn't sometimes do things that the govt. heavyweights can't, but, as an academic, I can tell you that virtually all fundamental research is paid for by governments. If you dig into virtually any invention or product, you'll be hard pressed not to find some concept, technique, or technology that wasn't at least partly paid for by government funds.

What am I saying? With the education system we have, all innovation is thanks to public funding.

I read a great quote, but I don't know who first said it, about Libertarians: "A libertarian is someone who looks out from the Empire State Building and thinks he's 1600 feet tall." --He totally ignores the blood, sweat, and tears shed by a multitude of forbears that put him up there and thinks it's all about him being so great and tall.

Unless we can get over our libertarian, anarchist fetishes, we can expect the future to be something that happens somewhere else, while we go back to just growing a bunch of corn for everyone, like we used to do.

I don't actually, however, think we can get over that, though. Americans are just too ignorant to even know that there's a problem. They are told they are great, so they're great. Even in the face of ever-mounting evidence that the US is mediocre at best in just about anything you care to measure, it will forever be the greatest country in the world in the minds of its citizens.

And that's why I live in Japan.

Out source space too...

[The Grim Reefer2]

I guess the US will be exporting space exploration to China now as well.

Types of conservatives

[Junior J. Junior III]

Conservative: n. 1) A person who holds to conservative principles or beliefs. 2) A person who agrees with other people who call themselves Conservatives, without regard to their actions, statements, beliefs, or principles. 3) A person who opposes anything that a non-Conservative (as defined by the first two definitions) says, does, or believes in.

that's not why they hate it

[SuperBanana]

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.

Uh, no- all congresscritters hate it because NASA is giant cash-cow for the defense industry- companies like Lockheed-Martin and Boeing. Hell hath no fury like a congresscritter who wants to stand on a platform in front of a defense factory in his or her district, come election time, and talk about how important the makers of the A43 Latrine Servicing Truck are to the defense and security of our great nation.

All those probes, satellites, etc? Built by defense contractors, carried up on rockets built by defense contractors, and very often launched from launch facilities owned by defense contractors.

The shuttle costs half a billion dollars per launch, for example...and almost everything NASA does is outsourced to government contractors.

Rational decision based on irrational constraints

[robot256]

If conservatives want to have a civil war over the space program, then fine. The simple fact is that the new space program is the most rational allocation of the woefully inadequate NASA funds that politicians are willing to throw at them. Nothing more, nothing less.

As a NASA engineer, I agree that it is a shame we are shutting down all our manned launch programs for the time being, but completing the Ares project would have meant shuttering just about every other research & development effort. NASA's most valuable resource is their innovative scientists and engineers--it really is a waste to have most of NASA's budget going to routine space flight tasks.

The new budget cuts manned launches but redirects those funds to long-term research that will make future manned launches both more productive and less expensive. Extensive research into propulsion, navigation, life support, and self-sustainability will be carried out using inexpensive robotic missions and the International Space Station.

If the Republicans want someone to blame, then they should blame nearly every politician since the end of the Cold War for not pushing for more NASA funding and relevant priorities. And no, pork barrel projects don't count, only money that can be distributed based on scientific merit and technological feasibility really makes a difference.

The bottom line is the political climate makes it impossible to properly fund anything, including space travel. If you want to change that, tell your congresspeople to increase funding and support the scientific priorities--not pork projects--we need to make real and tangible progress in the quest to explore the universe

Space is critical

[salesgeek]

I always love debates on the space program. Lots of big ideas, but what is missing is leadership. What made NASA so successful in the 1960s and 1970s was that there was a clear objective: put a man on the moon. Build a reusable launch system. Put up a space station. The problem is that there are no real national goals with space, so it is exceedingly difficult to sell, say a heavy launch vehicle. Put some goals in, and suddenly money becomes easy because people buy into the grand plan. Say the goal is to put a permanent colony on the moon - or to put a man on Mars. Suddenly there is context and justification for spending, inventions to invent, and what is science suddenly turns into applied science.

Our politicians need to lead, not look for the people to lead them when it comes to space. An ambitious space program is just what is needed.

Re:Space exploration is conservative.

[Low Ranked Craig]

perhaps you've noticed that a huge chunk of the previous stimulus package went into just that

No, I haven't noticed that unless by "huge chunk" you mean 3%. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aJAoR5GECKWo

Conservatives? Who cares?

[QuoteMstr]

Why are we even talking about what conservatives think? The GOP has amply demonstrated that it has no interest in governing the country in good faith. Their entire program is:

1. When in power: transfer as much wealth as possible to the very rich
2. When out of power: throw a wrench in the works to make the government look bad enough to vote the GOP back into power

Any conservative argument needs to be critically examined in light of the question, "how does this allow the GOP to continue its looting?" Just look at Chicago economics, Reagan tax cuts, Bush's imperialism, and flagrant anti-union rhetoric. It's not made in good faith.

Conservatives have no interest in the real welfare of the country. This little spat about NASA is merely a disagreement among the foxes about whether to go through the front or the back of the hen-house. It should be an awfully strong hint that the rest of the world is governed by parties to the left of even the left here, and is going better for it.

Can we please stop wasting our time and giving attention to these right-wing lunatics and their pernicious ideas?

Re:Conservatives? Who cares?

[QuoteMstr]

You're confusing individual liberty with social justice.

It's not possible to enjoy personal liberty when you are worked to the bone, discarded at a whim, and can't afford medical care for your children. It's not possible to appreciate persona liberty when you're not educated, and it's not possible to rise out of those circumstances when economic opportunity is inherited. Without regulation, capitalism reverts to its natural state: liberty for the very wealthy and feudalism for everyone else, and Republicans have opposed regulation of markets for over a century.

If you really care about maximizing life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, you'll support policies that give everyone a chance to achieve these things. In the process, you'll be amazed by how much people "contribute" in return.

Re:Space exploration is conservative.

[wizardforce]

Our federal budget is 4.5 trillion this year. Why is NASA's ~20 billion so hard to pay for when we seem to have little trouble finding enough to spend about 2.5 trillion on entitlements yearly? Tell ya what; end the agricultural subsidies and we'd free up more than enough to pay for NASA. Maybe then we'd see more actual sugar used instead of that HFCS crap.

Yay, mindless idealism!

[copponex]

Libertarians are often ignorant of the fact that they effectively lobby against civilization. In terms of GDP per capita, life expectancy, innovation, and quality of life, the middle of the road socialist countries dominate worldwide. That's because if you shackle your society with continuous relearning of generational lessons, you can never move beyond basic progress.

If you'd like to refute the massive progress introduced by the Apollo program in the sixties, go ahead and make your case for a private corporation in the same time frame spending a good portion of the US GDP for pure research. Bell Labs is the only thing that even comes close.

A world of self regulation is just as absurd as a world with complete government control of production. Use the market for easily duplicated services that are not necessary. For everything else, try and use your brain. Mindless idealism nets nothing of value.

Summarized in economic terms by Adam Smith:

No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.

Who also believed

The legal rate... ought not be much above the lowest market rate. If the legal rate of interest in Great Britain, for example, was fixed so high as eight or ten per cent, the greater part of the money which was to be lent would be lent to prodigals and projectors [promoters of fraudulent schemes], who alone would be willing to give this high interest.A great part of the capital of the country would thus be kept out of the hands which were most likely to make a profitable and advantageous use of it, and thrown into those which were most likely to waste and destroy it.

When the legal rate of interest, on the contrary is fixed but a very little above the lowest market rate, sober people are universally preferred, as borrowers, to prodigals and projectors. The person who lends money gets nearly as much interest from the former as he dares to take from the latter, and his money is much safer in the hands of the one set of people than in those of the other. A great part of the capital of the country is thus thrown in the hands in which it is most likely to be employed with advantage.

(from naked capitalism)

GDP Per Capita

Life Expectancy

Quality of Life

Re:Space exploration is conservative.

[hey!]

Nice job of selecting the denominator to give you the result you wanted to report.

The total set aside for highway improvements: 30 billion.
Amount of that to be spent in 2009-2010 : 5 billion.

Now I don't know who thinks that five billion dollars on top of the huge amount being spent for showcase infrastructure projects (pork) isn't a lot of money, but I sure wouldn't call them "fiscally conservative".

Now the thirty billion could be spent faster, but I've seen what happens when government is spending money like it's burning a hole in its pocket. It stinks. It's an invitation to corruption and boondoggle and crony capitalism.

After 9/11, and after the anthrax attacks, I was working in a field that could be related (in a very tenuous way) to bioterrorism security. The Feds wanted lot of money spent, and *fast*. Nobody even *knew* how to spend that much money that fast on the problems they were supposed to be solving. But certain operators sure knew how to build a machine to consume money. You set up a subsidiary or company, hire lobbyists, hire cheap contractors (often outsourced after a layer or two to really cheap labor) and throw together some total BS project that you expected to disappear as soon as the mania subsided. It was the bottom feeders who were ready and willing with "shovel ready" projects.

What did we get for all that money spent so quickly? Nothing. The only people who could absorb money that fast were the dishonest ones who were specialized in sucking up money when it had to be spent faster than anybody could manage responsibly. People who were working in fields for years who just needed *little* things, a couple thousand dollars or maybe even ten thousand dollars were frozen out while consultants with no actual domain knowledge absorbed hundreds of thousands of dollars or even millions for BS projects.

Spending the money more slowly makes sense for several reasons. From the good government standpoint, it discourages the most rapacious freebooter contractors. It encourages people with sustainable projects to take the time to compete with the bottom feeders. If anything less jam today and more tomorrow would have been better.