Comments on: Smaller Government, The Final Frontier

By: Patri Friedman

Patri Friedman — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 01:57:13 +0000

Read _Kings of the High Frontier_ – it will cure you of any NASA nostalgia

By: markm

markm — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 17:04:21 +0000

What Matt said. The situation now is rather like if the Lewis and Clark military exploration expedition had been followed up by a permanent military program that got in the way of private exploitation of the new territories. Whether or not you agree with having a gov’t-run space program in the first place, we aren’t getting back the money NASA has already spent, but it’s past time for the gov’t to get out of the way and let private enterprise take over.

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 06:03:06 +0000

I'm not entirely convinced the space program would have happened at all without government pushing it forward in the '50s and '60s.

But the same is true of the internet in the '70s and early '80s. Before DARPA pushed TCP/IP, the future seemed to belong to closed proprietary technologies, and that was where all the private money was going.

And the solution to space should have been the same as it was for networking...euthanize the government monopoly as soon as the private sector shows any sign of being willing to take up the reins.

The government lost interest in space, but it was incapable of losing interest in having a space monopoly. So we got the half-assed program we've had ever since '69, where there's always enough money to do it over, but never enough to do it right the first time.

By: NeoWayland

NeoWayland — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 00:34:35 +0000

I don't think he is against a space program, I think he is against a government space program.

There is a line in James Mitchner's _Space_ that I think exactly summed up the whole government attitude to the space program. All though the novel, this Senator from a Western state has been pushing the space program. He watches the Moon landing from Mission Control as a VIP. And then he says the line.

"Now we can get on to important things."

And just like that (in the novel and in real life), the space program died. No more romance, no more pushing the edge of human achievement, no more universe opening up to us.

For their next bit, they built a space truck. A space truck that spends much more time being repaired than it does in space.

By: Jim Collins

Jim Collins — Wed, 03 Jan 2007 17:44:08 +0000

If the Space Program had licensed all of the technology that it paid to have created, it would be financially self-sustaning. From previous articles I have read here I thought that you would be one of the Space Program’s biggest fans.