A Stitch in Haste

Washington is again wrangling over the NASA budget, including President Bush’s call for the U.S. to return to the Moon and commence planning for a manned mission to Mars:

President Bush’s plan to send man to Mars in coming decades received a green light Thursday as the House passed a bill funding the annual budgets of NASA and the departments of Commerce, Justice and State.
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On Bush’s plan to eventually send man to Mars, the House on Wednesday rejected by a 259-163 vote a move by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., to stop early stage preparatory work to send U.S. astronauts to Mars as the House debated a $59.8 billion measure funding.
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The underlying bill gives Bush’s moon and Mars plan full funding, while grants to state and local law enforcement agencies would be cut for the sixth consecutive year.

The Twentieth Century space program was a perfectly reasonable government expenditure for a very simple reason: the Cold War. In a post-Soviet, “sole superpower” era, there is no rational basis for the Moon-Mars mission that the President endorses. Our fiscal difficulties generally, and our other military priorities specifically, make the program particularly irresponsible.

I blogged about this issue over a year ago, in a post entitled, “Space — The Final Appropriation.”

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What sort of a world is it at all? Men on the moon, and men spinning around the earth, and there’s not no attention paid to earthly law and order no more.
–A Clockwork Orange

One of the stickier wickets for some libertarians is the issue of government-funded space exploration.

Is “space exploration” a public good? Does it generate positive externalities? Does it help preserve our competitive advantage globally? Is it the high-tech version of global paternalism (i.e., we have to get there first so the Soviets Europeans Japanese Chinese don’t muck it all up)?

Or is it a political diversion (i.e., the Politics of the Warm Fuzzy Feeling)? A boondoggle to favored industries (i.e., the Politics of Pull)? The Broken Window Fallacy (sure, the space race gave us Tang and Teflon and neat-o ceramic technologies, but what else might we have gotten instead with the money and man-hours that were committed to it)? Does it stifle private ventures in the area?

Looks like we might have to start asking those questions all over again:

NASA’s new administrator and Texas Republican Rep. Tom DeLay said Tuesday the space agency will have the necessary funding to implement President Bush’s vision to send astronauts back to the moon and to Mars.

“We have the money to do good things,” said Michael Griffin, who has visited at least seven of NASA’s centers since he was appointed in April.
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DeLay said NASA is a priority — even in a time of war and tightening budgets. “We will provide the funding necessary to get us where we want to go,” the House majority leader said. “And hopefully we can do it in an expedited manner.”

If I may remain an earth-bound (i.e., real-world) libertarian for a moment, I find the assertion that “we have the money to do good things” utterly preposterous in the current fiscal environment. And as for DeLay’s statement: Who exactly is “we”? Was space exploration a major issue in the election? I must have missed that exit poll.

Even if you can persuade me that the government should be worried at all about returning to the Moon or going to Mars, you still have to convince me that the opportunity cost is not too great. And, unless Osama bin Laden is located on a cave in Olympus Mons, I can see no scenario where you could so convince me.

There’s just too much “earthly law and order” that needs attention right now.

Meanwhile, here’s a space-based program that clearly qualifies as a public good: asteroid detection. And for those interested here’s a Space Politics Blog. I like their logo: “Because sometimes the most important orbit is the Beltway…” Very true.

Suggested Reading:

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Similar Posts:

• Space: The Final Appropriation…
• Even the Space Shuttle Has Broken Windows
• “NASA’s Proper Role” Update
• Fly Me to the Moon Deficit
• The Artful Moondoggle

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