American competitiveness needs space program

It is unclear what — if anything — will replace the shuttle as a craft for continued human space flight.  NASA has rockets that can send robotic probes to explore outer space.  But the shuttle was America’s only way for humans to get there.

The hope is that retiring the aging and expensive shuttles will free up federal money for developing a new launch system that can take us beyond the low earth orbit of the station — just 220 miles up — and into deep space.  The heavy lift of a 21st-century spacecraft could take us back to the Moon, on to Mars, and into the beckoning beyond.  The hope, too, is that private U.S. commercial space companies have advanced to the point where they can make smaller spacecraft capable of ferrying people as well as provisions to and from the station.

Yet, for all the considerable promise of private commercial space exploration, it is not at all clear that commercial rockets will be able to be “man-rated” by NASA to taxi astronauts any time soon.  And, sadly, one of the very few recent examples of bipartisanship in Washington has been the utter bipartisan failure thus far to figure out what to do next in human space flight, how to make it work, and how to pay for it at a price our chosen leaders think we can afford.

While the Congress and the President try to find some way to work together to sort all this out, the only way we will have to get American astronauts to the space station, once the shuttles stop flying, will be on the Russian Soyuz spacecraft.  The Russians are charging us the bargain basement price of $55 million for each seat.

Meanwhile, back on earth, in my former Congressional district in Florida, which includes the Kennedy Space Center, thousands of workers are likely to be laid off later this year with the end of the shuttle program.

Several decades ago, following the shutdown of the Apollo moon shot program, Florida’s “space coast” became, for a time, a ghost town.  Some of those left jobless didn’t even bother to close the front doors of their abandoned homes when they left town.

The fear at the Cape and along the coast is that it will happen again.  Unemployment in Florida is already 12%.  The Florida real estate market is one of the worst in the country.  The loss of the shuttle program will ripple throughout the region.

At a time of growing concern about American competitiveness, does it make sense to throw away the critical mass and the critical skills of thousands of space workers whose labors have secured and sustained America’s comparative advantage in what will surely be one of the key global industries of the coming century?

But the approaching end of the shuttle program is about much more than the loss of much-needed jobs by hard-working people in my hometown.  For far too long, far too many in both our political parties in the Congress and in successive presidential administrations alike have treated human space flight as just another job-producing public works project.

That’s not how I saw it years ago when I was vice president of the space club at South Seminole Junior High School in Central Florida, and we were reaching for the moon.  That’s not how anyone who has ever worked for America’s space program, or in any way been a part of that program, sees it.

As we see it, the space shuttle Discovery was rightly named.  If America stands for anything, it stands for discovery.  Our historic task as Americans is to discover more.  It is to use our freedom to extend as far as we can the ultimate reach of human experience, knowledge, and understanding.  To fulfill this task, we must reach for the stars.

James Bacchus is a former Member of Congress, from Florida’s 15th Congressional District, which includes the Kennedy Space Center.  He was one of the principal Congressional sponsors of the International Space Station.  He chairs the global practice of the Greenberg Traurig law firm.