It’s been 61 years now since that event upended U.S. space policy. It’s worth (re)reading a piece I wrote a few years ago at The New Atlantis, while we’re waiting for my most recent one to come on line. Sadly, it holds up pretty well, and I would make the same policy recommendations today.
2 thoughts on “Sputnik”
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As much as we are grateful for NASA’s historic victories in the space race, when it comes to basic access to space we should roll back the agency’s mission to something resembling that of its predecessor, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA). Through its basic and applied research, its dissemination of information, and its strategic grant-making, NACA did much to boost the aviation industry during the first half of the last century. NASA should be reconceived along those lines, to serve primarily as an enabler of, rather than a substitute for, private enterprise. This will in turn allow it to focus its scarce resources on more cutting-edge human missions beyond low-Earth orbit.
I couldn’t agree more. In fact I remember having this exact discussion with you on USENET’s sci.space.policy more than a decade ago. Today the parallels are even more striking. We haven’t yet gotten to the Wright v Curtiss patent battles, but the playing field is starting to take form.
When the Russians tried and failed get, in the words of Theodore Sorenson, “a man to the Moon and return him safely”, their organizational system was the Design Bureaus, essentially centrally planned Communism.
When NASA was charged with that task, the organization system was a kind of private business/government cooperation that Eisenhower called “the military-industrial complex”, others called National Worker’s Socialism and Albert Speer would have called a really neat idea? And it employed many of the engineers and scientists who once worked under Mr. Speer’s organizing genius?
I guess in the historical examples where this system was tried, what the Star Trek writers described as “the most efficient system of government ever devised” in the episode Patterns of Force, may have been good for a “sprint” but fell to its internal contradictions over the longer term?