The wealth of constellations: can the free market save the space program?

• Author: Homans, Charles

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Marine Major General Charles F. Bolden has made a career of taking on daunting assignments. After growing up black in segregated South Carolina, Bolden spent his teenage years badgering congressmen into helping him gain admittance to the nearly all-white U.S. Naval Academy

in Annapolis. Shipped out to Southeast Asia in 1972, he flew more than a hundred missions over Vietnam and Laos. After the war he spent a few years test-flying experimental aircraft, then--why not?--became an astronaut. When the space shuttle Columbia blasted off from Cape Canaveral in January 1986, sixteen days before the Challenger explosion, Bolden was in the pilot's seat. So when President Barack Obama was looking to fill the top job at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration last May, the ex-astronaut, then sixty-two and retired, seemed a natural choice. NASA was four years into its most ambitious project since Apollo, a plan to send American astronauts back to the moon and, in time, on to Mars. It needed a leader equal to the challenge.

Nine months later, however, Bolden received an assignment even tougher than overseeing the mission: getting rid of it.

Under the budget released by the Obama administration in February, NASA was to get out of the business of human spaceflight altogether, at least for the near future--no more space shuttle or rockets, no capsules or moon-landing apparatus. In their place, NASA would oversee something very different: a $6 billion, five-year contract for a handful of private companies to ferry American astronauts to and from the International Space Station--to operate a fleet of space taxis, more or less. Human spaceflight, the province of national identity and aspiration since Yuri Gagarin first hurtled into orbit, was going to be outsourced.

So it was that Bolden found himself, on a Wednesday in late February, sitting alone at a witness table on Capitol Hill--in the same Senate hearing room where he had been lavished with praise during his confirmation the previous summer--facing a panel of livid senators. "I absolutely believe," Louisiana Republican DavidVitter declared, "that this budget and the vision it represents would end our human spaceflight program as we know it, and would surrender--at least for our lifetime, perhaps forever--our world leadership in the area" Others railed about the more parochial concerns that accompany the cancellation of giant government programs. "Those seven thousand folks directly in Florida and maybe fourteen thousand others who are impacted--what are we going to say to them?" demanded Senator George LeMieux, Republican of Florida, whose Space Coast depended on NASA and its contractors for jobs. Even Robert "Hoot" Gibson, the commander on Bolden's first shuttle mission, was called to testify against the plan. "This abrupt change in NASA's exploration approach has no clear path," he told the panel. "No destination. No milestones. No program focus."

Bolden's wiry five-foot-seven frame, already diminished by a big-around-the-shoulders suit jacket, seemed to shrink further as the speeches and interrogations wore on--they weren't so much questions to be answered as questions to be endured, and the administrator gamely endured them for an hour and a half. "I--I really do look forward to continuing to work with you all," he said as he finally stood up to leave. "We'll get it right."

In the hallway a scrum of half a dozen reporters was waiting. "Mr. Administrator--" one of them called out, but Bolden just nodded politely and kept walking, the soles of his shoes clopping against the marble. The scrum followed, shouting questions: What exactly was the plan? Did NASA still intend to go to Mars? When? How? The administrator's brisk walk now bordered on a jog. Just before the pack spilled into the rotunda at the end of the hall, an Associated Press correspondent managed to plant himself in front of Bolden. "Mr. Administrator," he said, panting, "what is your vision? When are you going to have a vision?" Bolden stopped and looked up at him, a plaintive note in his voice. "I think I have a vision," he said.

The Vision: It is constantly invoked at NASA, at once the government's most relentlessly technical and most airily mystical agency. (The Office of Housing and Urban Development does not talk about the Vision.) NASA's goals and ambitions have never been particularly justifiable in any concrete sense; when Wernher yon Braun, the ex-Nazi rocket scientist who designed the Apollo program's Saturn rockets, was asked what the purpose of going to the moon was, he replied, "what is the purpose of a newborn baby? We find out in time." You could get away with that in NASA's 1960s glory days, when the agency's accomplishments were splashed across newspapers' front pages and its mantra, posted on the walls of its contractors' rocket factories, was "Waste anything but time."

But once the space race was won and Americans' attentions returned to the planet they lived on, NASA's focus gradually shifted away from the Vision and toward the goal of every aging bureaucracy: survival. The space agency has spent decades in a holding pattern, sinking billions of dollars into projects of questionable usefulness and limited popularity--the space shuttle and the International Space Station--that have kept astronauts and engineers occupied, but have also left the agency even less able to pay for the frontier-expanding ventures that were once its hallmark. One administration after another has struggled to find its way out of this conundrum, announcing Mars missions, lunar bases, and plans for exotic new spacecraft. But these projects have almost always failed to pan out, leaving the agency more cash-strapped than it was before, at which point NASA quietly goes back to the old shuttle routine and hopes that no one really notices. "The agency has been sort of wandering in the desert for forty years," says Scott Horowitz, a former astronaut and Bush-era NASA associate administrator.

What is different now is that for the first time, the old routine is no longer an option. The shuttle is slated to make its final flight next year--the production lines for its fuel tanks have already been shut down--and the agency has nothing ready to take its place. This means that NASA won't have a vehicle to reach the International Space Station it has spent eleven years and $48.5 billion building--and will find its knowledge of how to pull off human spaceflight atrophying rapidly. It's a hell of a bind: NASA must choose between spending a heap of money continuing the meet the obligations of the present--the space station missions and other activities in earth's orbit--and directing its resources toward the ambitions of the future, new exploratory missions that might be decades away from happening and are hardly guaranteed to even happen at all. In the midst of a recession, it can't do both.

The Obama administration's NASA plan is an attempt to escape this fix. While the details have yet to be hammered out, and still await passage by an inevitably hostile Congress, the idea in a nutshell is this: if NASA helps commercial companies get their rockets onto the launch pad, and those companies find a market for their services beyond NASA, the agency's human spaceflight program will finally be free of its expensive obligations to maintain its rudimentary orbit-oriented activities. Instead of spending billions a year on shuttle launches, the agency can simply book astronauts on commercial flights for $20 million or so a pop. With the money it saves, NASA can redouble its research and development efforts to acquire the technology it needs to push the boundaries of exploration once again. It's this potential for the expeditions of the future--and aerospace jobs in the present--that Obama emphasized in a speech at Cape Canaveral in April aimed at stemming a growing political backlash against his new policy. But for this to happen, the other part of the plan has to work--low-earth-orbit space travel has to go from being a resource-sucking government program to an efficient business.

The best reason to think this idea is not completely crazy is because something like it has happened before. In 1925, when air travel was still in its infancy, Congress passed the Kelly Airmail Act, which allowed commercial airlines to bid on U.S. Postal Service delivery contracts. The government backing allowed the fledgling airlines to expand their routes and service offerings; demand for cargo service increased, and, as flight got cheaper and came to be viewed as a normal and non-death-defying means of getting places, passenger service increased, too. Through a combination of private-sector ingenuity and government seed money, a new industry was willed into existence.

But even the earliest, most rickety commercial airlines at least enjoyed the advantage of traveling between places where people lived; it was easy enough to think of things that needed to go from point A to point B, and could stand to get there faster. Commercial spaceflight, by contrast, has to contend with the fact that there aren't many things that actually need to be done in space. In effect, the rocket builders don't just have to figure out how to serve a market--they have to create one. The plan is risky in more serious ways, too: NASA is gambling that private...