I have no problem with this, as worded. It’s probably about the best you’re going to do and still have consensus, given who was involved in crafting it. I disagree, though, that the 2010 NASA authorization is consistent with it. I’m sure they had to say that to get Bingham to go along.
4 thoughts on “The Space Declaration”
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Do we really want government, any govt. to be our partner?
Yes, they do. With all their heads. Because in their mind, there is no other way.
Furthermore, they’re not going to bite the hand that feeds them. Rick Tumlinson was homeless a couple years ago. Some JSC employees took him in and let him sleep on their couches. Now, he’s got two NASA study contracts.
To answer Ken, they still feel that the government has to pay for it, but that private interests will do it…
Except that it’s always been that way. NASA didn’t build all the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Shuttle, or ISS hardware. Private partners (or government contractors, as we called them in the old days) did that.
There is little difference between that and what’s being advocated today, except for the names of the contract — er, partners. Garrett Reisman of SpaceX said publicly that there was no significant difference between the final phase of CCDev and traditional government contracting.
What we need are markets beyond NASA. Commercial markets, ideally. If that’s too radical a step, there are government agencies other than NASA. There’s DoD (although many NewSpace wonks a built-in allergy to the US military). There’s also the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation, which has its own (small) R&D budget. George Nield would love to do more to stimulate the industry, which is part of their Congressional charter. But when he tried to get funding for a Cheap Access To Space prize a few years ago, groups like SFF refused to even talk about it.
G. Harry Stine liked to quote Kipling when he talked about space-project funding: “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays; And every single one of them is right!” But the NewSpace community is fixated on NASA funding as the One True Way.