In Search of a Conservative Space Policy- New Atlantis
American civil space policy has been in turmoil since February 2010, when the Obama administration clumsily rolled out its new plan for NASA’s human spaceflight program along with its budget announcement. The new plan cancelled Constellation, the program intended to carry out President Bush’s 2004 goal of returning to the Moon by 2020, a goal that a blue-ribbon review panel had pronounced unrealistic under available budget constraints. The new plan also required NASA, after the already scheduled retirement of the space shuttle in 2011, to rely on the private sector to deliver its astronauts to low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station, just as it has been doing for satellites for years. And the new plan emphasized the development of technologies that would enable a potential return to the Moon sooner than the failing Constellation plan — as well as open up the rest of the solar system to affordable human access.
The political reaction has been, to put it mildly, bizarre. Some conservative members of Congress, who would normally be expected to defend private industry against a large government bureaucracy, have instead attacked it. For example, Senator Richard Shelby (R.-Ala.) denigrated private space companies as mere “commercial hobbyists” — even though that category includes multibillion-dollar firms with decades of space-launch experience, like Boeing. Meanwhile, the Obama administration, which has hardly been shy about intervening in and remaking entire sectors of the economy, has in this one instance declared its intention to outsource a longtime government function to the private sector. As one space policy analyst put it, “Democrats don’t think that capitalism works within the atmosphere, and Republicans apparently don’t think it works above it.”
This political confusion raises the question: What would a genuinely conservative space policy look like? To answer this, one must first understand the history of the U.S. manned spaceflight program — how it got started on the wrong foot, and how it is now shaped more by pork and prestige than by actually accomplishing useful things in space.
The Sputnik launch in 1957 was the single greatest determinant of early U.S. space policy decisions — decisions that have continued to resonate for the past half century and affect plans well into the decades ahead. The little beeps coming from that Soviet satellite, heard by amateur radio operators the world over, seemed to toll an ominous warning to a complacent nation. Back then, to be a conservative meant, among other things, to fiercely oppose the existential threat of Soviet communism — and to be willing to take almost any action to contain or defeat it. In response to being beaten into space, the U.S. government quickly accelerated its own space efforts. Partly as a propaganda ploy, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established NASA in 1958 as a purely civilian space agency to demonstrate that, unlike the Soviets, American civil space activities would be peaceful, and cleanly separated from military pursuits.