I’m just as eager to see more manned exploration of the solar system as the next person, but Newt Gingrich’s announcement the other day is just so much moonshine:
The basic idea is not actually as far-fetched as it sounds. NASA in 2006 announced plans to set up a colony on the south pole of the moon, in around 2020, as a base for further manned exploration of the solar system.
The problem for Gingrich, a space enthusiast with ideas dating back decades for zero-gravity honeymoons and lunar greenhouses, is that the 2008 financial crisis came along and turned feasible projects into pipe dreams.
“A lunar base by 2020 is a total fantasy,” John Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, told AFP.
“We got to the moon in the 1960s by spending over 4% of the federal budget on Apollo. NASA’s now at one-tenth of that level.”
The initial problem is both financial and organizational: for all the money being poured into NASA, each dollar is producing much less in the way of science and technology because of the calcified bureaucracy. NASA achieved great things during the Apollo program, but the bureausclerosis was setting in even before the first shuttle flew. To get the kind of results that the “old” NASA achieved, you’d have to blow it up and start from scratch — or better yet, privatize the whole shebang and get the bureaucracy out of the way of the entrepreneurs.
As Robert Zubrin pointed out in the February issue of Reason magazine, NASA has become far too concerned about safety — less out of genuine concern about the astronauts and other employees, but more because of the negative effects of bad PR on the next year’s budget. Under the current NASA management, none of the pre-shuttle launches would have been allowed because they were too dangerous (and we know how dangerous the shuttle was, in hindsight).
The initial problem is both financial and organizational
Two, two problems: financial, organizational and political. Three. There are three problems … I’ll come in again.
The political is the big elephant in the room. Our political attention span is two-years long. If a big national project takes longer than that, it’s toast.
The Fed is broke and dysfunctional. Fine. There is a way around this. An XPrize.
“First American majority-owned company to send and sustain 30 men on the moon for three years gets a 10-year long tax holiday and 4 billion dollars, tax free. You’ve got 10 years. Starting … now.”
Put this in legalese, pass it in the Senate and we’re done.
We can quibble about the numbers. Note this does not exclude international partners, or suppliers.
If it _can’t_ be done then the money is safe.
If it _can_ be done we get a privately owned moon base, plus infrastructure to deliver men and supplies to anywhere inside Lunar orbit.
Prizes work. They worked to get flight going in the 20th century, they got the first private astronaut in history to space.
I doubt we’ll see this; it’s too easy, too much of a loss of control.
Comment by Brian Dunbar — January 27, 2012 @ 14:09