Moon base policy commentary

12.12.2006 19:57 Space - Source: Space Politics

Moon base policy commentary

I have to admit that I was a little surprised at the level of media attention NASA's lunar exploration announcement Monday received, since it had been clear since the beginning of the Vision that part of the overall plan included establishing a base of some kind on the Moon. That coverage included front-page articles by the Washington Post and New York Times, the latter of which attracted the attention of none other than Stephen Colbert. ("That's right, a giant project with no blueprint, no budget parameters, and no timetable. That means there's only one person who can make this thing work: Donald Rumsfeld.")

The announcement attracted its fair share of editorial reactions, most of which fell into two predictable camps: many approved it, saying there was "abundant justification" for the venture, while others worried about the cost of the project and suggested the money could be better spent elsewhere. Yeah, you could see that coming.

A few editorials do stand out: yesterday USA Today ran a pro-and-con pair of editorials on the proposal. The "opposing view" piece, by NASA administrator Mike Griffin, called the overall exploration effort "a down payment on our future" and drew parallels to Lewis & Clark and Seward's purchase of Alaska. "Our great-great-grandparents accepted the challenge of their frontier. Will today's generation do less? And if so, why? To save 15 cents per day?" The "pro" piece, by the newspaper's editors, admits that NASA's vision is "compelling" but argues that technology and cost issues argue for an alternative approach: "That approach might use off-the-shelf rockets, such as those that launch commercial satellites and military and scientific payloads, to save money. It might also take a look at the low-budget operations of space pioneers such as Burt Rutan to see whether they might be tweaked to advance beyond suborbital space tourism." As the editorial also notes, "The human inhabitation of space in any significant numbers won't happen until someone can tackle the costs of getting astronauts the first hundred miles up."

An editorial in today's Wall Street Journal also proposes an alternative that is music to the ears of many commercial space advocates. The editorial requires a subscription, but here's the key paragraph:

Say NASA believes it can build a permanent moonbase for $100 billion in today's dollars. Why not take half of that and offer it as a bounty to the first private company to build the station and man it. A prize in the neighborhood of $50 billion is bound to attract plenty of interest -- and that number is probably much less than a realistic guess of what it would cost NASA in the end. The taxpayer would save 50% of NASA's cost to build the base, and the result would be much more likely to be attractive to the private interests that NASA wants to draw to the project.

So, should NASA focus on space transportation versus exploration, even though previous efforts by the agency to reduce the price-per-pound of reaching orbit have failed? Is $50 billion enough to lure private interests to develop a lunar base—and if the $50 billion alone isn't enough to the venture to be profitable, could a base eke out revenue elsewhere? What about alternative mechanisms, like a 25-year tax holiday for the first company to establish a lunar base, as has been proposed in the past by the likes of former Congressman Robert Walker and others?