SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and its Dragon capsule are fantastic achievements of the private sector. The latest mission to ISS has gone flawlessly. So, naturally, what do you think the politicians are doing?
They are cutting its budget in order to kill the program.
Many of the pols HATE the commercial space program. They would love to see it fail. Why? Because they have NASA centers in their districts--centers with tens of thousands of employees dedicated to flying the Space Shuttle.
"The Space Shuttle? But that's not flying anymore." Right--but the jobs are still there. And the pols, who could care less about New Space, about exploration, about expanding humanity into the solar system, are doing the one thing they are good at:
Getting re-elected.
And the centers are looking for new things to do. Perhaps in a future post, we can look at some of the make-work things that are going on.
New Space is going to win out. In the long run, it's not going to rely on government funding, except perhaps as one of many customers. It's going to win out because it is safer and less expensive than using astronauts for everything. It's going to win out because the resources that it will mine from the Solar System are valuable.
But for now, the Old Space government-political complex will throw as many rocks as it can, preserving the obsolete rice bowl.
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