It seems that the meaning of national identity has changed over time. It used to be that when people said we did something as a nation, they meant Americans did it. It didn’t matter whether they did it for themselves with their own means or whether they had some official title. What mattered was that they were Americans. Now it seems that people rely on their government programs to create a national identity for them. For instance, today when people say we went to the moon, they mean NASA, a government run program funded by Americans took certain other Americans serving in some official capacity to the moon. The difference between these two meanings is vast.
To this day, we Americans claim the Wright brothers’ accomplishments as American accomplishments, and rightly so. After all, they operated in a uniquely American environment that didn’t prevent people from trying something crazy like flying, if they wanted to spend their time that way. Yet they were totally self-funded, and were actually competing against a rival who was well funded by congress, Samuel Pierpont Langley (who no one remembers because his congressionally funded contraptions never flew). Is the accomplishment of the Wright brothers any less American because they lacked similar congressional funding? According to today’s interpretation of national identity, instead of claiming the success of the Wright brothers, Americans should claim the failures of Langley.
Today, many Americans complain that NASA is being gutted. The shuttle is being decommissioned with no viable replacement, since plans for the Constellation have been scrapped. The most common objection is that we will lose our supremacy in space. Even people who otherwise support radical spending cuts morn putting NASA under the chopping block. But congress should be doing everything it can to cut wasteful spending, and NASA is not immune to waste. Indeed, as Richard Feynman pointed out, the Challenger disaster, which set NASA back by ten years, was largely due to the bureaucratization of NASA. There is every reason to believe that private industry can do a better job. For one, if a private company displayed the same incompetence that lead to the Challenger disaster, they would probably not be in existence today.
But as NASA is scaled back (rightfully), so too should the regulatory burden that is hindering private space exploration be scaled back. For instance, it took 11 years, according to Peter Diamandis, to get permission from the FAA to launch a company that would make a private sector zero gravity experience available to the public. And when Diamandis launched the original X prize, he had to go to the FAA and explain to them that current regulations prevented competitors for the prize from flying their vehicles in America. Unless the laws were changed, the accomplishments of the X prize would in no way be American accomplishments. In fact, Dr. Diamandis goes on to explain that if the current regulatory regime had been in place at the beginning of the aviation industry, we would not have an aviation industry.
The truth is that private space exploration is held back more by bureaucracy than by technology. The only thing keeping the private industry out of space is an astronomical regulatory burden. But when these hurdles are overcome and private industry in America eventually goes to the Moon and then to Mars, it will be no less an American feat, just because the government didn’t fund it. Risk aversion and budget cuts may ensure that the future of space does not lie with NASA, but the real danger is that if the bureaucracy remains stubbornly resistant to being dismantled, we can be sure that the future of space will not belong to Americans, either.
