Socialists in Space
MANY VIEWED THE space race of the 1950s and ’60s as a battle between American free enterprise and Soviet communism. But the space program wasn’t exactly a free market endeavor.
The original purpose of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) was simply to help extend the development of aviation technology into space—a federal intrusion into the economy, but not a huge one. But with the advent of the Apollo program in 1961, the agency expanded into a massive state enterprise with no room for markets. Because the space race was viewed as an urgent battle in a potentially existential war, cost was no object; the saying around the agency was “waste anything but time.” Because there was a mandate to get to the moon quickly, NASA did it in the most expensive possible way.
This unfortunately created the perception that it had been done in the only possible way. Spaceflight, according to the conventional wisdom, simply had to be accepted as an intrinsically exorbitant endeavor, something only the government of a superpower could do.
With the space shuttle, this mentality continued. NASA would develop and operate a single type of launch disaster in 1986 ended the use of the shuttle for commercial payloads. Fortunately, the Air Force had fought to preserve its own capabilities to get its satellites into space, so once it was no longer forced to use the shuttle for military missions it could continue with the Delta, Atlas, and Titan rockets that it had been relying on since the early ’60s.
