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Closing the new frontier

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 12, 2010

"We have an agreement until 2012 that Russia will be responsible for this," says Anatoly Perminov, head of the Russian space agency, about ferrying astronauts from other countries into low-Earth orbit. "But after that? Excuse me, but the prices should be absolutely different then!"

The Russians may be new at capitalism, but they know how it works. When you have a monopoly, you charge monopoly prices. Within months, Russia will have a monopoly on rides into space.

By the end of this year, there will be no shuttle, no U.S. manned space program, no way for us to get into space. We're not talking about Mars or the moon here. We're talking about low-Earth orbit, which the United States has dominated for nearly half a century and from which it is now retiring with nary a whimper.

Our absence from low-Earth orbit was meant to last a few years, the interval between the retirement of the fatally fragile space shuttle and its replacement with the Constellation program (Ares booster, Orion capsule, Altair lunar lander) to take astronauts more cheaply and safely back to space.

But the Obama 2011 budget kills Constellation. Instead, we shall have nothing. For the first time since John Glenn flew in 1962, the United States will have no access of its own for humans into space -- and no prospect of getting there in the foreseeable future.

Of course, the administration presents the abdication as a great leap forward: Launching humans will be turned over to the private sector, while NASA's efforts will be directed toward landing on Mars.

This is nonsense. It would be swell for private companies to take over launching astronauts. But they cannot do it. It's too expensive. It's too experimental. And the safety standards for getting people up and down reliably are just unreachably high.

Sure, decades from now there will be a robust private space-travel industry. But that is a long time. In the interim, space will be owned by Russia and then China. The president waxes seriously nationalist at the thought of China or India surpassing us in speculative "clean energy." Yet he is quite prepared to gratuitously give up our spectacular lead in human space exploration.

As for Mars, more nonsense. Mars is just too far away. And how do you get there without the stepping stones of Ares and Orion? If we can't afford an Ares rocket to get us into orbit and to the moon, how long will it take to develop a revolutionary new propulsion system that will take us not a quarter-million miles but 35 million miles?

To say nothing of the effects of long-term weightlessness, of long-term cosmic ray exposure, and of the intolerable risk to astronaut safety involved in any Mars trip -- six months of contingencies vs. three days for a moon trip.

Of course, the whole Mars project as substitute for the moon is simply a ruse. It's like the classic bait-and-switch for high-tech military spending: Kill the doable in the name of some distant sophisticated alternative, which either never gets developed or is simply killed later in the name of yet another, even more sophisticated alternative of the further future. A classic example is the B-1 bomber, which was canceled in the 1970s in favor of the over-the-horizon B-2 stealth bomber, which was then killed in the 1990s after a production run of only 21 (instead of 132) in the name of post-Cold War obsolescence.

Moreover, there is the question of seriousness. When John F. Kennedy pledged to go to the moon, he meant it. He had an intense personal commitment to the enterprise. He delivered speeches remembered to this day. He dedicated astronomical sums to make it happen.

At the peak of the Apollo program, NASA was consuming almost 4 percent of the federal budget, which in terms of the 2011 budget is about $150 billion. Today the manned space program will die for want of $3 billion a year -- 1/300th of last year's stimulus package with its endless make-work projects that will leave not a trace on the national consciousness.

As for President Obama's commitment to beyond-lunar space: Has he given a single speech, devoted an iota of political capital to it?

Obama's NASA budget perfectly captures the difference in spirit between Kennedy's liberalism and Obama's. Kennedy's was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons. Obama's is a constricted, inward-looking call to retreat.

Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

"To say that the United States should be answerable for twenty-five millions of dollars without knowing whether the ways and means can be provided, and without knowing whether those who are to succeed us will think with us on the subject, would be rash and unjustifiable." --James Madison

"[Barack] Obama's touted spending freeze for some domestic agencies is the politics of gesture. It would apply to only 17% of the budget, and these programs have already had a 22% increase in their annual appropriations in the past two years, and another 25% increase including stimulus. As for the deficit, CBO shows that over the first three years of the Obama Presidency, 2009-2011, the federal government will borrow an estimated $3.7 trillion. That is more than the entire accumulated national debt for the first 225 years of U.S. history. By 2019, the interest payments on this debt will be larger than the budget for education, roads and all other nondefense discretionary spending. If this borrowing were financing defense investments or tax rate reductions to spur the U.S. economy, we wouldn't be worried. But most of this money is going to transfer payments to individuals, or subsidies to home buyers and inefficient businesses that do little for wealth creation. As it always does, CBO forecasts that deficits will decline in the later years of its 10-year budget window. But this forecast depends on assumptions about Congress so fanciful that James Cameron couldn't make them up. ... If the President and his party really are serious, they can do more than promise a spending freeze after 2012. They can stop spending more now: Drop the health-care bill, cancel the unspent stimulus spending from last year, kill the $150 billion new stimulus that has already passed the House, and bar all repaid bailout cash from being re-spent. Everything else is marketing." --The Wall Street Journal

Upright
"The problem is not the 'crises' Obama inherited. It's the ones he's creating. He has lived in such a socialist policy shell all his life that he doesn't have a clue that he's on a different planet than most of us. If he were just slightly less narcissistic, he might be able to figure this out. But ... no matter what adjustments he promises to make following the Boston Massacre, he still intends to govern like a socialist. He only wants to do a better job of figuring out how to do it less visibly, hoping we won't 'get it' before it's too late." --columnist David Limbaugh

"An across-the-board tax cut is the fairest pro-growth message of them all. Lower tax rates for everybody. Get out of the box of rich people and class warfare. ... Republicans must now be bold and fight for across-the-board tax relief, for families, individuals and businesses, along with smaller government, fewer services and across-the-board spending cuts." --economist Larry Kudlow

"The President could wait months before deciding to give a general the troops he asked for to fight the war in Afghanistan but there was never to be enough time for the health care bill to be exposed in the light of day to the usual Congressional hearings and debate. Moreover, despite all the haste, the health care program would not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election. In other words, the public was not supposed to find out whether the government's takeover of medical care actually made things better or worse until after it was too late." --economist Thomas Sowell

"The result in Massachusetts last Tuesday showed that for yet another segment of the population which has had the opportunity to express itself at the ballot box, Obama's policies have diminished from a lack of resonance to active dissonance. Obama can tinker with the political shop all he wants, but to misquote my neighbor James Carville: It's the policies, stupid." --political analyst Rich Galen

"As even Massachusetts demonstrated ... most Americans believe Americans know how to solve their problems through initiative, limited government and hard work, not through the nanny state." --American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.

"There is a simple way to get corporate money out of politics: get the government out of our lives and economic affairs. If government has no favors to sell, no one will spend money trying to win them." --columnist John Stossel

Hello, from North Texas ...

I'm Dick, my wife's Ramona, and our dogs are Greta and Jake.

As the month of March arrives, we'll observe our 48th wedding anniversary. This year, as last, with cards and a hug.

For better or worse, Arlington Villa is home now, for sure.

We don't get around like we once did. although we gave it the old college try awhile back when we drove to Northern California for my sister's 50th anniversary. Thank God we did go, and go and go for more than forty years, when the juices were flowing and we had the money, the opportunity and, most of all, our good health. We've made one concession to the advancing years; we don't drive much at night.

Of course, the folks we know and might visit are, except for the "kids," in bed and asleep by the time it's dark.

Friends still ask occasionally why I spend so much time on three websites. The answer's simple. They're fun. I still learn something new most days. And, this remains the only bully pulpit I have left.

Thanks for stopping by .. hope you enjoyed your brief visit. Hope you'll return when I've decided what kind of site we want to be.

~~~