50 years in space

Do we need NASA?

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Editors' note: This is part of a series examining 50 years of space exploration.

The birth of modern aviation probably lies in Charles Lindbergh's 1927 flight across the Atlantic, which won him a $25,000 prize and a ticker-tape parade down New York's Fifth Avenue.

By showing the world to be just a little smaller than before, Lindbergh fathered the 20th century's transportation revolution. The airship named after German entrepreneur Ferdinand von Zeppelin took its maiden flight the next year, and by the early 1930s both Boeing and Douglas were selling passenger planes to fledgling airlines including TWA, United and American. Not long afterward, the famous Douglas DC-3 made transcontinental flights practical.

Compare the rapid progress in aviation with America's experience in space travel. Fifty years after Sputnik 1's launch in October 1957, mankind has set foot on precisely one other world (a moon, at that), the space shuttle has at best a 1-in-50 chance of disaster upon each launch, and a completed space station is still a few years out. Since the last moon landing 35 years ago, in fact, mankind has not ventured beyond low Earth orbit again.

The difference? Critics say it's the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Aviation's youth and adolescence were marked by entrepreneurs and frenetic commercial activity: Lindbergh's trans-Atlantic prize money was put up by a New York hotel owner, and revenue from the airlines funded the development of the famous DC-3. The federal government aided aviation by paying private pilots to deliver air mail.

Space, by contrast, until recently has remained the domain of NASA. Burt Rutan, the aerospace engineer famous for building a suborbital rocket plane that won the Ansari X Prize, believes NASA is crowding out private efforts. "Taxpayer-funded NASA should only fund research and not development," Rutan said during a recent panel discussion at the California Institute of Technology. "When you spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build a manned spacecraft, you're...dumbing down a generation of new, young engineers (by saying), 'No, you can't take new approaches, you have to use this old technology.'"

Rutan and his fellow pilots, venture capitalists and entrepreneurs have undertaken a formidable task: To demonstrate to the public that space travel need not be synonymous with government programs. In fact, many of them say NASA has become more of a hindrance than a help.

From moon landings to freight hauling
Soon after its creation in the 1950s, NASA captured the hearts of America's youth with vistas of outer space and other worlds, illustrated by unforgettable moments like Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong setting foot on the moon.

But by the late 1990s, the agency seemed to have become more moribund than innovative. In 1999 alone, NASA lost the Mars Climate Orbiter (because of English-Metric unit conversion problems) and Mars Polar Lander (likely because of a programming error). Then, after spending $1.6 billion on space plane research, NASA abruptly abandoned the project.

Late that year, NASA's problem-ridden Hubble Space Telescope was offline for more than a month. And NASA shuttle launches seemed to have devolved into repair missions and transportation for science experiments. Its mission, in other words, seemed to be shifting from historic accomplishments to the more matter-of-fact business of freight hauling.

The shuttle had become so problematic that Time Magazine published an article titled: "The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped." It dispassionately listed the shuttle's failings: It was intended to be an example of American technological prowess; instead it is fragile and antiquated (until recently the flight deck computers used 1978-vintage 8086 microprocessors). It was supposed to be flown every week; instead it flies a few times a year. It was supposed to cost $5 million a flight; instead it costs a staggering $1.3 billion a flight.

NASA leadership also discouraged private space travel. Then-administrator Dan Goldin publicly disparaged millionaire Dennis Tito's choice to pay a reported $20 million to fly to the space station on a Russian spacecraft, calling the former NASA scientist "un-American" for doing so. A few years earlier, though, NASA had flown a lawyer and insurance executive named Jake Garn and Bill Nelson--who had become influential members of the U.S. Congress--on space shuttle missions. Also during Goldin's tenure, NASA also took steps to block entrepreneurs at Russia's MirCorp from being able to use Russian supply rockets or gain access to a key tether that could have helped to keep Mir aloft.

But the Commercial Space Act of 1998 eliminated the long-standing prohibition on bringing vehicles and people back and forth from space and opened the door to what would become the commercial space industry of today. (Six years later, the federal government formally gave approval for Rutan's SpaceShipOne to launch a suborbital flight in pursuit of the X Prize.)

Peter Diamandis, chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation and a private space entrepreneur, says NASA can remain relevant--but only by focusing on what for-profit companies won't do. "NASA should be in focusing on breakthroughs in propulsion systems. They should be taking very high risks, funding things that are likely to fail because that's what government should be doing, pushing the envelope," he said in an interview with CNET News.com.

For its part, NASA says it's moving in that direction, pointing to policy directives including one from 2005 decreeing that the agency "will normally procure launch services for NASA and NASA-sponsored primary payloads from commercial providers."

"We're trying to get out of this low Earth orbit business," said Ken Davidian, program manager for NASA's Centennial Challenges program. "If there are commercial suppliers of space capabilities like launch vehicles for cargo delivery, we're required by law to use them. We want to use them. The premise is that those services will be cheaper to buy than to use ourselves."