NASA’s underfunding seems to be the only thing, apart from shuttle launches, that gets space in the news these days. People need a frontier to challenge them, which is why watching Discovery blast off into the night on Sky News while sipping a pint of the black stuff in the pub makes most blokes feel good. But NASA can’t keep this up, and while most other national space agencies deal in small change, putting them all together might actually result in a programme with enough resources to do the things we actually need done in space.
It is fair to argue that, with the world in recession, space exploration is low on the budget list. However, there are some things which happen up there which are either essential or very important for us – launching, reparing and maintaining satelites, experiments in low and zero gravity, setting up a system to detect and head off large asteroids before they wipe us out – these are all actually useful. Other missions are less immediately useful, but probably worthwhile.
The gap between the $18bn NASA gets now and the $21bn that the Augustine Panel estimates is needed to do things properly is tantalisingly small. If the US, Europe and the other nations with space programmes all agreed to lump all their programmes together in an international agency, and fired a few surplus administrators, we could actually have a very good international space programme.
Merging all the existing national space agencies into one international body, probably loosely tied into the UN somehow, would end the extension of nationalism into space, which would be a very good thing. Only people who are still looking at the world through the blinkers of nineteenth century nationalist ideology care which ‘nation-state’ gets men back on the Moon next. The first international organisations – the International Postal Union for example – were set up the end wasteful national competition and make the worlds postal system work, and they hum along nicely now as part of the UN system. There is no reason why UNASA couldn’t work, apart from national thick-headedness.
I’m not suggesting that space exploration has to be done by governments – far from it. I think private enterprise may in the end get us more results that official programmes, and I have shares in a little private spaceflight company to prove it. However, a private company is not a nation state; and the rivalries of private spaceflight companies are commercial, not jingoistic. Virgin Galactic don’t care where you were born or what passport you hold, as long as you have the price of a ticket.
And that is the nub of it. NASA doesn’t have the price of the ticket. The European Space Agency certainly doesn’t have the budget for a manned spaceflight programme, or a programme for getting to the Moon. Countries like India or Brazil will never do more than launch communications satellites, to be free of dependence on the US or Europe for thier launch needs. China and Japan’s programmes are driven by proving that they can do it, symbolic of national power. If someone had the nerve to pull all those programmes together, there would be more than enough resources to do all the useful stuff we need on the final frontier, together. Many people are willing, even mad keen, to risk being an astronaut and having their ashes sprayed all over the stratosphere in some spectacular failure, but apparently none of out political leaders have to guts to get it together, or even the vision to suggest that we would do it better, cheaper and faster if we did it together.
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