ANALYSIS | The touchdown of the Atlantis orbiter, after a perfect mission to the International Space Station, has brought the space shuttle era to a close. Under current plans, the era of government run space travel to low Earth orbit has also ended.
The space shuttle program itself was a 40 year experiment in running a government space line, taking crews, cargo, and satellites to low Earth orbit. The shuttle was supposed to lower the cost of space travel, thus making a return to the Moon and missions to Mars more practical. The shuttle did not fulfill that promise for a number of reasons, the most significant of which is that while the government does some things well, it rarely does anything cheaply.
Still, the space shuttle program accomplished a lot. The shuttle helped to build the International Space Station, which will be the focus of human space flight for the next decade or so. The shuttle deployed and serviced the Hubble space telescope, which has revealed so much of the nature of the universe. The shuttle launched numerous satellites, conducted long term Spacelab missions, and generally advanced the art of space flight in low Earth orbit.
The plan now is to try again to develop a system to lower the cost of space travel to low Earth orbit, this time with privately developed space craft financed primarily through U.S. government subsidies, but also some private investment. The approach of using massive government subsidies to develop commercial space craft has been criticized for a number of reasons.
Some believe that the commercial approach is too risky to bet the future of human space travel. The Bush administration had a public option in the Ares 1/Orion space craft that would have been available if the private sector failed to step up or ran into delays. The Obama administration killed that project and has essentially gone all in with government financed, privately run space craft.
Some have also pointed out the problems in a commercial system in which the government is not only the primary investor, but also the primary customer. Not a lot of attention on the part of the government has been directed toward helping commercial space firms develop private markets for their space craft, say by passing the Rohrabacher "zero gravity/zero taxes" bill. Already, some have expressed fears that NASA, through concerns for crew safety, will try to micromanage the development of these commercial space craft, increasing the cost and delaying the beginning of their operation.
Finally there are concerns about the ultimate cost of a government subsidized commercial space craft program. As an article in Aviation Week points out, while the commercial crew projects such as the SpaceX Dragon/Falcon 9 project have not yet hit snags, they are still early in their development cycles. There is not as much transparency in either the finances or the technical status of the projects. If commercial space projects run into problems, as such projects have a tendency to do, the American tax payer may be on the hook for more money beyond the almost six billion dollars now allocated.
Still, the SpaceX system has had one successful flight, launching an unmanned Dragon into Earth orbit, then reentering it into the Earth's atmosphere for a successful splash down in the Pacific. The next test, scheduled for a November launch, would involve a cargo mission to the ISS by an unmanned dragon. A successful test would presage the beginning of commercial cargo flights to the space station. The Dragon and Boeings CST-100 are being developed for manned flights as well, starting in 2015.
Mark R. Whittington is the author of Children of Apollo and The Last Moonwalker . He has written on space subjects for a variety of periodicals, including The Houston Chronicle, The Washington Post, USA Today, the LA Times, and The Weekly Standard.
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