Former astronaut and current space activist Phil Chapman has a long and depressing (but largely accurate) history and assessment of our “manned space program” over at Space Daily today.

Fortunately, he also has some policy prescriptions. They involve, among other things, taking it away from NASA, which in his words, has thoroughly “bungled it.” I think he’s right.

He makes one other point that I’ve been meaning to post on.

…Apollo existed because Jack Kennedy and Nikita Khruschev chose to make space a principal arena for competition between the superpowers. The purposes of the program were to overcome the perceived Soviet lead in space, and to foreclose the possibility that the USSR would reach the Moon first and claim it as Soviet territory. No Congress was willing to spend more than the minimum needed to achieve those objectives.

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 relieved concerns about Soviet hegemony by banning weapons and territorial claims on the Moon. This allowed Congress to respond to Lyndon Johnson’s simultaneous expansion of social programs and the war in VietNam by slashing funding for NASA. As shown in Figure 1, the budget peaked in 1966, and then fell precipitously.

This is one of many reasons to withdraw from the OST. Like the ABM Treaty, it’s a relic of the Cold War, and the collectivist mind set in vogue in the decolonializing fifties and sixties.

There are at least three good reasons to make it null and void.

1) The one listed above–it destroys any possibility of international competition by banning sovereignty, (which was in fact one of the reasons that we entered into it–it did indeed allow us to spend less money on space, which was what Congress wanted).

2) It discourages private property rights, due to the lack of sovereignty, because it’s not clear how a government would defend the property rights of its citizens absent it. This in turn significantly reduces incentives for private investment.

3) It places a heavy liability burden on the governments of its signatories, which is one of the reasons that we have such an onerous regulatory process for space launch.

OK, there’s a fourth reason, perhaps the best one–it would really cheese off the French.

It has no explicit recognition of individuals or private corporations, or provisions for their activities–it is written as though only governments are actors in space (largely because at the time it was written, that was the case, and few could imagine any other possibilities).

So, as long as, “cowboy like,” we’re undoing the damage of other treaties, I propose that we consider getting out from under this one as well, and start negotiating a rational replacement.

It’s been holding us back in space for decades, and it’s long past time to consign it, along with the socialist impulses from which it’s derived, to the dustbin of history.

[Update at 8:38 AM PDT]

Ken Silber points out a column he wrote on this subject in Reason five years ago, which I’d read, but had forgotten.