I voted for “continued at about the present level,” but there need to be some improvements, safety-wise.

1) I saw on TV, I think, that with the shuttle, there is no way to save the crew in the event of a serious malfunction during blast-off. Anyone remember those little rockets atop sort of a tower fixed to the nose-tip of the Mercury, Gemini, and I think Apollo craft? Those were analogous to ejection seats in jet fighter aircraft, and could blast the manned capsule away from a fatally-disabled rocket during take-off, letting the manned portion come down in a parachute landing. Why can’t they have that on the shuttles?

2) Apparently, the Columbia was already doomed from the time it took off, since that piece of debris had damaged the wing’s heat-absorbing tiles. Imagine some future situation in which the ground has to tell the crew in space that there is no way they can re-enter the earth’s atmosphere, because of wing damage! That’s not acceptible. For every shuttle flight that takes off there should be two others waiting to take off at a moment’s notice for the duration of the first’s mission, just in case the first crew needs to be saved by rendezvous and docking in orbit with a sister ship. In addition, these shuttle craft are truly huge — why can’t they travel always with life-boat capsules aboard? There’s certainly enough room to stow them somewhere. These could have the form of the older Gemini or Apollo capsules, for example (but they’d have to seat seven or so), or they could have a glider form like the shuttles. If the ground had to tell a crew their shuttle craft couldn’t re-enter because of wing damage, for example, the crew could at least re-enter in the life-boat.

3) No mission to the moon should be undertaken unless there are two ships standing by on earth for the duration of the mission, ready to blast off at a moment’s notice and save the first crew in the event of some emergency — even if they have to be saved from the surface of the moon. The first crew must travel with sufficient oxygen, food, and water to survive while waiting for a rescue ship to come from earth.

The Space Program should be privatized.

If someone can point out where in the Constitution the federal government is authorized to be involved in this activity, I will vote to continue it. Until then, I’ll just shake my head and rue the death of our republic, which is—make no mistake about it—deader than a doornail. That so few today understand or care that programs like NASA are illegal under the US Constitution is proof of that.

TIM, what’s stopping private outfits from getting into space right now? Anyone of the big contractors, like Martin-Marietta, MacDonald-Douglas, Lockheed, etc., could enter the payload-launching business tomorrow and likely be very successful at it. What’s holding them back?

Bubba, I agree with you. If someone wanted to discontinue the national space program on Constitutional grounds, I’d agree with them. And I’d hope they’d discontinue a lot more than just the space program on those grounds.

Of all the things that the U.S. government currently does that could be said to violate the Constitution, it seems to me the space program (which has a defense component, an exploration component, and a science component) would be of relatively minor seriousness. Indeed, based on what Bubba says about the space program, the Lewis and Clark expedition (which also had defense, exploration and science components) also violated the Constitution and left the Republic “deader than a doornail.” In which case all the other complaints about constitutional violations and usurpations that conservatives have made over the last 200 years have been superfluous, since the Republic was ALREADY dead by 1803. So what was there left to complain about?

I’m not denying that many un-Constitutional or extra-Constitutional activities are now institutionalized in the federal government and that this is a very grave problem. I’m just saying that some constitutional usurpations (e.g. the Incorporation Doctrince which turned the Bill of Rights on its head) are far worse than others and that we should try to keep things in perspective.

To add a bit to my original post: I was just reminded by today’s newcasts that the space station is in orbit and was, of course, when the shuttle was. One wonders whether a shuttle rendered incapable of re-entering due to take-off damage could simply rendez-vous with the space station, discharging its crew therein.

One has to ask why the wing damage wasn’t better inspected while the Columbia was in orbit. I heard on TV that it was probably inspected by means of spy satellites redirecting their aim toward the shuttle, and by powerful telescopic tracking instruments on earth. (I heard that for some technical reason, the astronauts weren’t able to simply “space walk” out along the wing to inspect the damage themselves, before attempting re-entry.) Clearly, now that the space station will always be in orbit, no shuttle should attempt re-entry without total certainty of its fitness for re-entry, and if there is any question it should discharge its crew into the space station instead.

I’m not enthusiastic about the space program because it’s become an expression of multicultural, feminized, bureaucratized attitudes I don’t like. Flying people back and forth into orbit for some experiments doesn’t mean much.

But beyond that, even if the space program became more adventurous, like aiming at a manned slight to Mars, the program as it is now will still convey the same empty, liberal attitudes of the current culture, and just projecting them on the cosmos. As our culture is now constituted, every major act of our culture must be an expression of liberal attitudes. So, while I would like to be for a more ambitious space program, I would rather see a change in the culture first, then the space program would be the expression of something worthwhile. As we are now, I don’t WANT us to be spreading out to the cosmos.

A very interesting part of the discussion is this whole business of the space program being “unconstitutional”. For some reason I have never even heard a word about this; I suppose it’s not a topic of debate outside the United States (then again, maybe it’s not even a topic of debate WITHIN the United States). Would anyone care to enlighten me with a short summary of the main points in this matter?

I favor full privatization of the program. I believe that a private enterprise (or several competing entities) could better assess the cost/benefit ratio of manned versus unmanned flight. As things currently stand, too much “national ego” is tied up in the space program. The “man on the moon” program was launched to prove that the United States could get there before the Soviet Union did. However, I don’t think this worked effectively to curtail Soviet expansionism in the 60s and 70s. On the other hand, President Reagan’s direct confrontation with the Soviets in the 1980s was ultimately successful. Private entrepreneurship and ingenuity led to the rapid development of personal computer technology over the past 20 years, and this might be a model of how quickly a private approach to space exploration could advance. My hunch is that there would be a shift away from manned flight and toward the use of sophisticated robotics and remote sensing devices.

If it were a good idea for private enterprise to do it, why isn’t that happening already? The existence of the Post Office didn’t stop Fedex and UPS from coming into being. I don’t say this to advance any particular public space policy, but I don’t think the notion of privatizing NASA has been thought through.

Martin:
Amendment X says “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Those powers are specified in Article I, Section 8, and later amendments, which do not technically mention space travel (or retirement pensions, national parks, drug prohibitions, territorial expansion, etc. etc.) Or so is my understanding of that argument.