Recharging the space race before America loses for good

Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the United States of America and the commercial space industry. Unfortunately, we are far away from zipping around the galaxy in futuristic spacecraft. However, we are entering a new frontier in our journey to space, one of a private space travel industry.

I wrote a few months ago on President Obama cutting the budget from the Constellation space program (the NASA program that was on track to replace the Space Shuttle program). At the time, I was very upset with the lack of direction for the United States and NASA. Well, three weeks ago, the White House released its new National Space Policy and it sets forth a new, albeit vague, direction for the future.

I’ll spare you some of the boring policy details, but basically this policy hopes to shift space travel from a NASA operation to a private firm based operation. We’ve seen a good number of companies testing space flight vehicles and several competitions for design in the past decade. It is now the United States’ plan to begin to rely more on these companies than on NASA, except in cases involving national security which would preclude using the private sector. In addition, the policy also called for extending the life of the International Space Station until around 2020, which will allow humans to maintain a constant presence in Earth’s orbit.

I have been following some of the space industry, located mostly on the West Coast, for a while now to see what sort of direction they were going. While there is definitely a great deal of money being pumped into these projects (what else would one of the rich Microsoft founders spend his money on?), they still have some time before they are ready for full-fledged commercial space flight. When you think about all of the testing and training that goes into developing the space programs at NASA, you can begin to understand some of the barriers that the private sector face. I have no doubt that the growing space industry will rapidly rise to the challenge, but it is going to take some time and an incredible

amount of money.

The space industry is going to first focus on low-cost, low-orbit flights for consumers in order to start making some of their money back. While the government will pay them to deliver payloads into space, there is no real economic incentive for a company to develop deep space capabilities.

Even though this administration has published an actual plan now, the direction is still vague.

While it sets goals to rely more on the private sector and to invest more into research and development, it doesn’t set forth any concrete goals to achieve. I understand in today’s world space exploration is expensive and the cost outweighs the benefits many times. I also understand that if we want to have a robust science and math education program in the United States, we need something like a strong space program for kids to strive for. I think what will

happen in the end is we will not have much of a space program,

NASA or private, for the next five to eight years. In that time, other nations could very well surpass our capabilities. But maybe that is what we need, a little competition to spur the next great Space Race.