Space programs perish.

I've got a little more coherent take on the Gehman report than my ramblings here, over at NRO.

Hi Rand. You wrote:

> Even Apollo, for all of the lofty rhetoric
> surrounding it, was not really about space, or
> opening the high frontier ? it was about
> demonstrating technological superiority over
> totalitarianism. Sadly, rather than making it a
> race between free enterprise and socialism, we
> instead (partly in order to keep the American
> Left and the Europeans on board, partly because
> there was a Cold War on) made it one between
> democratic socialism and totalitarian
> socialism, by setting up a monolithic
> government agency to accomplish the mission.

I don't understand your comment about keeping "the Europeans on board" since ELDO/ESRO contributed absolutely nothing to the Apollo program. Or did you perhaps have the Space Station in mind?
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In any case, although I think I broadly agree with your NRO article, I don't see how America could possibly have managed to land men on the Moon before the Soviets, *without* government funding & management. Remember: Apollo was a vast Cold War quasi-military undertaking facing a strict "before the decade is out" deadline. I don't think the Robert Goddard and Charles Lindberg free enterprise approach would have been sufficient.

MARCU$

I meant primarily moral support, Marcus.

In any case, although I think I broadly agree with your NRO article, I don't see how America could possibly have managed to land men on the Moon before the Soviets, *without* government funding & management. Remember: Apollo was a vast Cold War quasi-military undertaking facing a strict "before the decade is out" deadline. I don't think the Robert Goddard and Charles Lindberg free enterprise approach would have been sufficient.

I don't think that I ever claimed that we could have.

My only point is that, because it became a national imperative to beat the Soviets to the moon, we ended up with a state enterprise space program, rather than a more free-enterprise space industry that might have had us much further along by now, and it's made it difficult for us to even think about space in that context, as witness the current brain-dead policy debate going on in Washington right now.

> My only point is that, because it became a
> national imperative to beat the Soviets to the
> moon, we ended up with a state enterprise space
> program, rather than a more free-enterprise
> space industry that might have had us much
> further along by now, and it's made it
> difficult for us to even think about space in
> that context, as witness the current brain-dead
> policy debate going on in Washington right now.

Certainly, NASA (JSC in particular) would be a much smaller organization if Apollo had never happened.
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I think the greatest tragedy of the Apollo project was that huge sums of money were spent on management methods and technologies that just didn't turn out to be very useful for other, more utilitarian purposes. The Shuttle sort of inherited the worst parts, e.g. the Kennedy Space Center launch infrastructure and "standing army". Maybe things would be different, if the starting point had been the X-15 rather than Apollo.

MARCU$

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