Stanley Kurtz has been thinking about space recently, as evidenced by a Corner post he put up last week mentioning the sadly misinformed Anne Applebaum column in the WaPo. There, he wrote:

In any case, Applebaum?s attack on manned space exploration is worth reading. I?d like to see a serious rebuttal. In the end, though, these questions have more to do with what inspires you. That?s not a matter easily settled by argument.

After that post, I emailed him with a link to my critique of her piece, in response to his wish. He didn’t respond directly, but he did cite me and my post in this column that ran yesterday.

He is right, in that it depends on what inspires you, but that’s clearly not all that it depends on, because even many people who are inspired by space (e.g., yours truly) are not inspired by the government’s approach to it. Similarly, people who aren’t inspired support the government space program for reasons pragmatic and prosaic.

One of my pet peeves shows up in both his and Applebaum’s piece’s titles–the word “mission.” The use of such a word betrays a narrow mindset of space as science, space as exploration, space as a government program.

While his essay is thoughtful, it misses the point, because space policy discussion can’t be simply divided into “space lovers” and “space haters,” any more than general policy discussion can be usefully dichotomized as an argument between “right” and “left.” Though many simpletons in the media (though I’m not including Mr. Kurtz in that category) would like to make it so, policy is simply not that simple.

A “space lover” can love space and love NASA, or love space and be very skeptical of NASA and its ability to achieve the space lover’s goals. A “space hater” can be opposed to NASA because it’s a perceived waste of money, or because it’s perceived to be part of the evil military-industrial complex, or they can be opposed to space, period, regardless of whether or not it’s NASA, because the very notion of people leaving the earth and polluting the rest of the universe is heresy. There are going to be different arguments, and different policy solutions to deal with each of these viewpoints, and it’s not particularly useful, or even insightful, to divide them between lovers and haters.

Here is what I think is the nut of his concern:

Space lovers rest an awful lot on visionary inspiration. What the space program lacks, say the lovers, is vision. The shuttle is a useless link in a nonexistent chain of vehicles and settlements that is supposed to point us to the moon and Mars. Like the shuttle, the space station lacks any real purpose, and is consequently plagued by cost overruns, delays, and technological promises that don’t pan out. Set a bold goal for the space program, we’re assured, and the purpose and efficiency of the original NASA will return.

The administration has bought this argument. And up to a point, I think it’s correct. The shuttle and the space station have no clear purpose. A difficult, inspiring goal will attract new blood and reduce bureaucratic inefficiencies. Still, I wonder if “the vision thing” fully explains NASA’s post-Apollo blues.

It doesn’t. I do in fact think that we are lacking vision, and that coming up with one with broad appeal is a necessary and sufficient condition to coming up with sensible policy to carry it out. But, as I’ve written before, and will again (probably tomorrow, depending on what the president says) a destination is not a vision.

I don’t expect people to be inspired by the thought of government employees going off to the moon and Mars. I would expect them to be inspired by a vision of a new frontier in which they can participate, first as tourists, and then, if they wish, as settlers. The New World analogy may not be appropriate, but we won’t find out until we seriously attempt it, and the arguments put up against it are weak, and often disingenuous.

Clean energy from space, moving mining and industry off planet where it won’t pollute, herding errant asteroids that may have our number, providing a new venue for the further development of the vital experiments of freedom and self government–all of these are aspects of a vision that could appeal to a broad swath of humanity. Yes, it may turn out that these don’t pan out, but no one can say with any credibility now that they cannot. As Rick Tumlinson writes, the “why” is critical to any new space policy, particularly in determining the “how” (including “who”–NASA or some other government agency or agencies, or private industry or some optimum blend of these), and I’ve heard lots of “where” and “how” discussed, but no “why.”

But my sense is that the “vision” offered by the president tomorrow won’t include any of these things, because there’s probably a perception that they’ll sound too pie in the sky. That’s too bad, because absent that, I see little different in what I’ve read so far from the policy announced by the president’s father fourteen years ago, and we know what happened to that.