Why doesn’t the government privatize NASA? Sure, Uncle Sam can retain a token office as a NASA HQ for business management. But, why not place NASA in the private sector? Then, we might actually send a person to Mars in a reasonable amount of time, for one! Imagine the possibilities! Competition does wonders!
What company or group of investors would purchase NASA? How would such a group expect to profit from the work that NASA does, which is primarily scientific research, advanced technology development, and space exploration? On what basis rests your claim that, "we might actually send a person to Mars in a reasonable amount of time?
Stranger
Business expects a return on investment. NASA produces no salable product.
How, pray tell, does a private firm make a profit through spending billions on exploration, research, and (to be blunt) publicity stunts?
What incentive would a private owner of NASA have to send a person to Mars? I mean, the moon landing was great, but it certainly wasn’t profitable.
Historically basic research and “big projects” have been spearheaded by the government, with private money coming in once the risk to reward ratio comes down. Right now, private spaceflight is mostly launching private satellites and suborbital tourism for the extremely wealthy. Not exactly NASA’s mission statement.
Not that the private sector doesn’t do great things, but I contest the idea that privatization is a magic wand that makes public entities work better without considering the private sector entity’s motivations.
I’m assuming the plan is the government pays private businesses to do the things NASA has been doing. We’d have a company like Boeing building and launching satellites and space shuttles.
We do have “a company like Boeing building and launching satellites and space shuttles.” The United Launch Alliance and the United Space Alliance, both are private companies that are jointly operated by The Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin that provide final integration, launch facility maintenance and modification, and spaceflight operations for the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicles (Delta IV and Atlas V), and the Space Transportation System (Shuttle) respectively.
I’m continually surprised by the astounding ignorance of “space advocates” who assert just how much better private industry could do at building rockets and launching spacecraft when it is and has always been the case that private industry has designed, developed, and provided operational support to NASA or the US Air Force in the launch of virtually every spacecraft and nearly every suborbital rocket system of significant size ever flown. The sparse exceptions are the early Hermes program (modified A4 rockets salvaged from German facilities after WWII) and small sounding rocket programs run directly by Sandia National Labs, the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, the Allegany Ballistics Lab, and the Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory (now the misnamed JPL). NASA manages missions and, sometimes, acts in a prime integrator role (as it did on Apollo). NASA doesn’t build hardware or perform detail design of anything except prototype and research models.
It may be stated that NASA managed programs of this scale very poorly, but in fact, the programs that it manages and oversees, such as the development of the Saturn V and Apollo, or the STS, are larger and more expensive than virtually any product undertaken by private industry for profitable use. So far, “private industry” has yet to demonstrate so much as putting a live squirrel in orbit using self-designed launch vehicle system, much less demonstrating the capability of transporting human beings to the surface of Mars.
Stranger
Ah, that would make a bit more sense. And in the near term that’s essentially what NASA is doing, by cutting the Shuttle and replacing it with cheaper launches from Russia and commercial vehicles.
But there’s no company out there that has the capability to bid for a Mars mission. In the best case you’d end up with a couple aerospace companies that compete for some particular mission, just like with military procurement (eta: or as Stranger notes, many NASA projects). Which is hardly a model of free-market efficiency…
Since answers to the OP will necessarily require opinion, even though answers may be factual, it’s off to IMHO.
samclem, Moderator
That’s not true. Transport of satellites to orbit is a salable product. A mission to Mars is not a salable product, but that’s for the exact same reasons we shouldn’t be wasting time on a mission to Mars in the first place.
Lots of people have this idea that “privatization” is a good thing, without the slightest background in actual Economic Theory as to why this should be so. Unfortunately, it is an idea pushed by a lot of Conservatives and Libertarians, some of whom are propagandised into pushing it without understanding it.
Companies exist to make a profit. Privatizing any kind of essential service or non-economic enterprise is a BAD IDEA, as it introduces the Profit Motive, and incentives for companies to skimp, cut and cheat to make money off what would otherwise not be a profitable enterprise.
We spent millions creating the ability to put up satellites before it ever became economically viable. If we say something shouldn’t be done because it is not profitable NOW, then we may as well go back to living in caves.
NASA isn’t so much a single monolithic entity as it is a system for collaboration between academia and the private sector. Most of the technical folks who work for NASA also work for Lockheed, or Boeing, or the like, or for some university or other, or occasionally the Navy or Air Force, and their paychecks come from a combination of those sources.
Don’t look at me as somebody who supports the idea of privatizing NASA. I think it would end up costing more and accomplishing less. I’ve never bought in to the “private enterprise always works better than the government” theory. There are areas where private enterprise is the best solution and areas where it isn’t.
NASA is no longer in the space transportation business. They have contracted out their transportation needs to companies like SpaceX.
Frankly I think space activity will be on a sounder basis when it isn’t subject to the whims of congress. The federal government can continue to fund actual scientific research.
Except that NASA doesn’t transport satellites to orbit. It pays companies like Lockheed Martin (Commercial Titan III), Orbital Sciences (Taurus, Pegasus), and the the previously mentioned ULA (Delta IV, Atlas V) to launch satellites and spacecraft, or, not occasionally, contracts with the USAF to procure launch vehicles and services (Delta II, Titan family, OSC Minotaur I and V, et cetera). NASA provides launch facilities for space missions launched out of LC-39A/B and sounding rockets out of Wallops Island Flight Facility, but it pays other companies to actually build, integrate, and operate the space launch vehicles that it uses, and often pays the USAF or private companies to launch from their facilities.
There are other reasons to explore space besides profit (although any long-term exploration or human habitation should have self-sufficiency and ability to provide advantageous resources or capability back to the taxpayers as necessary goals). NASA is actually doing a pretty good job of sending missions to Mars (and other planets) and returning scientifically valuable data. They just aren’t sending people; in large measure because that is prohibitively expensive and risky to do, but also because the value of such a mission, in scientific terms, isn’t demonstrable compared to unmanned missions.
Actually, I would argue that there is no organization, public or private, which has the capability to assuredly (much less efficiently) undertake a mission to transport people to Mars and back. The technology of space propulsion, habitation, and resource utilization simply does not exist at this time or in the budgetable future (e.g. in the next decade) to make such a effort practicable.
We could undertake a stunt mission to place a few people on Mars to perform some kind of nominal scientific work (in between eating, sleeping, shitting, complaining, waving at the cameras, et cetera) and return them at high risk for low return for budgets measured in the eleven digit range. Or we can send one semi-automated rover with a wide array of scientific equipment that doesn’t get tired or stop up the toilet or complain about how other crew members chew their food noisily for a fraction of the cost and leave it in situ to operate through and beyond mission life until its power source fails or it suffers enough damage to render it nonfunctional for a small percentage of the cost.
That’s an excellent point. Even within NASA, the individual centers operate on a largely competitive and often proprietorial basis, jealously guarding and pandering their particular areas of expertise, and their work is often funded not just from the congressional line item funding to NASA but by research from or with other organizations, including the Air Force, DARPA, public and private space research organizations, et cetera. Anyone turning a wrench on hardware is most likely a contractor, not a NASA employee.
Stranger
I’m not saying a manned mission to Mars using rockets is not profitable. I’m saying a manned mission to Mars using rockets is not useful. Even if we could just teleport over to Mars for free, right now, what would humanity get out of it? It would satisfy your curiosity, but there is no reason to believe that it would do more than that. It’s not like Columbus trying to find a better trade route to China and India - it’s just a big, cold, dry wasteland. We’ve got those here on Earth.
You are forgetting the military. My friends at NASA tell me every shuttle mission was a military mission. It was just a matter of degree with each flight.
I think we are moving toward that. Who would have expected such an inovation from Obama?