America’s Rocket Renaissance

Steve:

You’re right. Burt said all those things. He was bemoaning both the lack of results and the lack of innovation in the U.S. space program in the decades that followed Apollo. He also has talked about the lack of bold programs like Apollo on the horizon. And I agree with him on a lot of what he says in those areas.

My point was that there’s a lot going on in terms of new rocket and spacecraft development. The U.S. has identified the problems it has and there are substantial efforts underway to deal with them. Some of it is responding to emerging markets like smallsats and suborbital tourism and research that have developed in the past decade or so. Other parts of that are attempts to forge a more commercial approach to orbital flights.

I guess where I also disagree with Burt is that I’m less troubled by NASA’s seeming lack of focus or clear goals in deep space. I once asked someone who worked with the Augustine Committee why the moon wasn’t selected as a specific goal. The basic answer is the moon is a gravity well. That’s true both literally and figuratively. A lunar destination quickly becomes a specific program, and a program has offices in places like Huntsville and Houston and Florida, and NASA will spend a quarter century working on that program even as the scale of it shrinks and the costs rise and the original purpose morphs into something different. That’s the lesson of ISS.

I think what we’re seeing in space is the emergence of a much more competitive and entrepreneurial industry where government will play a different role. That needs to be nurtured in the years ahead so that by the time NASA is ready to go beyond Earth orbit with humans, we’ve got a commercial sector that knows how to make money in space. Those companies will be much better partners for NASA at that point.

We’re even beginning to see that entrepreneurial drive beyond Earth orbit in companies like Golden Spike and Planetary Resources. They’ve both got a lot of elements of risk, financially and programmatic, so we’ll see how they do. But, the fact they’re being launched is a good sign.

Burt is missing the entrepreneurial churning that is going on, which I really believe will be a vital precursor to going out beyond Earth orbit again. It’s a period we need to go through. And it may be as innovative, in its own ways, as that first decade or so of the Space Age.