Everything you need to know about space

This year marks my twentieth year in space.  In 1991 I was appointed to monitor NASA programs for the minority staff of the House Committee on Science, and quickly made myself at home in a warren of cubicles in the Rayburn House Office Building that housed the “Subcommittee on Space, Science and Applications” staff— scientists and engineers of one kind or the other— who each year examined the president’s budget proposal for NASA and write the “authorization of appropriations” bill.

As a Republican outsider with just a political science degree, I learned quickly that I had to learn quickly to keep up.  Briefings by NASA officials and aerospace companies on every space mission and program were regular, almost daily occurrences, chock full of technical terms and financial reporting nuances I had little familiarity with.  Each week or so, the Subcommittee would conduct hearings for Members of Congress to question agency officials on the progress of specific programs. My job was to brief Republican members on the subject matters before them, suggest thoughtful questions to ask witnesses, write “opening statements” that reflected the policy preferences of GOP members— all in order to create a written official “record” on which to base the program direction and budget levels to be enshrined in the annual NASA authorization bill. Lacking any prior frames of reference than simple political common sense, and envious of my staff colleagues’ apparent experience and technical knowledge, I approached learning on-the-job with great vigor.

Here, in summary form, is what I learned from 20 years "in space"...

1. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.  Though space is the quintessential existential human endeavor, it has a steep price, especially where human space travel is concerned.  If the US wishes to remain on the forefront of human space exploration, it must pledge the taxpayer resources to do so.  Too many times, companies who pretend to heed the call for “commercial” space alternatives to government-owned space systems, fall short closing the business case.  Whether they are simply pandering to the anorexic political will that quickly seizes on any space program that’s “free,” when push comes to shove, few are serious entrepreneurs and even fewer risk more than marketing money.
2. Until magic is harnessed, moving any amount of useful material (equipment, satellites, laboratories, inter-stellar spacecraft) reliably off the face of the earth into low-earth orbit is apt to remain highly expensive.  Without huge numbers of launches to lower average per-launch costs, no magic fuel has been invented that breaks gravity for much less than $11,000 per pound, making space access exclusive to purposes able to justify the threshold cost.  Even though operational improvements by commercial companies may cut marginal space launch costs by noticeable amounts, the physics still require transporting huge amounts of fuel weight every time. 
3. Private space tourism is essential to government space exploration.  Given the high reliability and consequent price tags for making useful manmade devices (upwards of $25,000 per pound) that might be catapulted to orbit in any given year, opening the market model to safely launch natural human beings, who in fact pay for their “rocket ticket,” is the only viable strategy for vastly increasing launch demand and vastly reducing average launch costs.
4. There is no substitute for the president.  Because we’re not talking about meeting an immediate crisis— say, an asteroid on a direct path towards Earth menacing human extinction— the only urgency for funding space exploration by the US government must come directly from the president.  It’s almost cliché to repeat John F. Kennedy’s speeches that staked his reputation on sending humans to the Moon (and returning them safely to Earth…before the decade was out), yet Kennedy’s leadership is only reason why the Apollo missions were funded and completed.
5. NASA is weak.  Without the president leading the charge into space, NASA can’t lobby itself out of a paper bag.  Notorious cost overages in major programs are routine, making the most positively predisposed president reluctant to push for a budget that can’t be reliably upheld.  Public confidence in government is low; government confidence in NASA is lower.
6. Congress is weak, too.  When it comes to NASA, Congressmen and Senators with the power of the purse dare not exceed the president’s imagination or budget requests.  In the current fiscal crisis of super-committees and mandatory automatic cuts to discretionary budgets, it is very tempting to let NASA suffer and not look back.  With the major operational program of NASA, the Space Shuttle, permanently retired from its books, the chances of NASA surviving Washington’s new thermal-vacuum austerity with any meaningful capacity are slim-to-none.
7. The public is already there.  Apart from adding financial demand for space tourism, the general public that buys billions of dollars a year worth of science fiction books, games, movies and so-forth, must make their consumer demands heard by politicians.  Their multi-billion dollar purchases fairly represent proven investments in scientific, futuristic curiosity and, I would argue, a significantly higher public investment in space exploration.
8. Space is not timeless.  When it comes to NASA, a precious, perishable resource is at stake.  Despite due criticism, there is no other bunch of people on Earth who has “done it”— “it” being the ability to land humans on another celestial body and get them back alive— and they are dying off.  Bridging between the generation of engineers and mission planners that did to a new generation that can only hope is worth every penny, lest the know-how and can-do be irreplaceably lost.  Time is short and the consequences of failing loom large.
9. Sell the program and the dreams will follow.  For all of its faults, the imposition of a national infrastructure for access to space is akin to building the national highway system or the modern internet.  When NASA has failed to sell its missions to Congress, it turns to selling the many interesting “spin-offs” that have resulted from space technology, some of them remarkable, but most of these are easier and more economically invented without carrying the whole NASA budget behind them.  If NASA is worth funding, sell the missions and the science to be realized, not the ancillary "spin-off" benefits.
10. Sell the dream and the programs will follow.  If we have anything to show for the Apollo project and the expenditure of 1 percent of GDP that it required, it is too large to be appreciated.  An exceptional generation of young people grew up 100% certain they would travel frequently to space and live in colonies established on the Moon.  When that did not happen because their government abandoned those dreams, the generation that frequently calls themselves the “Apollo Orphans” went on to do such trivial things as build the internet economy, personal computing, biotechnology and the mobile web.  Who knows what else this mathematics-friendly generation might have invented had their country kept going into space?