Private Space wins the Race

Robert Zimmerman

Security,

Determining future American space policy, however, is really not that difficult. All Trump has to do is to look at the numbers.

At this moment no one really knows what President Donald Trump's space policy will be. His State of the Union speech on February 28 made only one fleeting vague comment about space, stating that "American footprints on distant worlds are not too big a dream." And though in the past he has expressed enthusiastic support for space exploration, and his transition team has indicated a preference for private commercial space plus a desire to return to the Moon, no specific details about their policy have been released.

Determining future American space policy, however, is really not that difficult. All Trump has to do is to look at the numbers.

The dueling manned space policy objectives of Congress and President Obama since 2010 has forced NASA to follow a two-pronged approach to manned space, and a comparison of these two approaches provides stark empirical evidence for determining the most effective approach for putting Americans in space.

The first approach is centered on the Space Launch System (SLS) and the Orion capsule. This program, strongly supported by Congress, has followed the traditional approach used first during the 1960s. The President makes a Kennedy-like speech outlining some specific target in space that NASA must reach by some set deadline. For Kennedy, the target was the Moon and the deadline was the end of the decade. For George Bush in 2004 the target was the Moon and beyond and the deadline was 2015. For Barack Obama, the target was first an asteroid by 2020s, and then Mars by the 2030s.

NASA then takes over, designing the mission, the rockets, and the spaceships, all based upon those specific presidential targets and deadlines. Since 2006 NASA has been building Orion and the rockets that will launch it, initially the Ares rocket under Bush and now SLS under Obama, in order to tackle the ambitious space proposals of these two presidents.

The second approach, begun during the Bush administration and continued aggressively by Obama, is entirely different. In its need to provide cargo and crew to ISS, NASA stepped back from running the show and instead became a mere customer. SpaceX, Orbital ATK, and Sierra Nevada were hired to build and launch competing unmanned cargo freighters while SpaceX and Boeing were hired to build and launch competing manned capsules.

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