With space shuttle finally dead, free market can do better job in space

By David McElroy · April 19, 2012

I remember the night of the first moon landing well. I was a little boy and I remember the flickering black and white images coming back to Earth. I couldn’t see much, but I was excited that we had reached the moon. It wasn’t quite “Star Trek,” but I was convinced we’d all be traveling in space pretty soon.

After the great achievement of reaching the moon, not much else happened. Oh, there were a few more moon shots — including the disaster of Apollo 13 — but the excitement was gone. There wasn’t a real goal anymore, at least not one that could be articulated and that was feasible. NASA hemmed and hawed about its value as politicians kept changing their minds about the agency’s mission. The Apollo program was canceled in favor of the space shuttle, which was conceived as a lower-cost craft by virtue of its being reusable. The “low cost” part didn’t work out so well.

Decades later, the space shuttle program has been shut down. Of the five fully-functional shuttles built, two were destroyed in flight, taking 14 crew members with them. As the shuttle Discovery was flown from Cape Canaveral to Washington this week for delivery to the National Air and Space Museum, there’s been a lot of hang-wringing among space enthusiasts about the end of the program. As much as space exploration excites me, though, I have to say good riddance.

Space launches are exciting. The idea of humans actually going into space and finding ways to expand the places where we can live is even more exciting. Since I’m not convinced we can all get along, the notion of finding different planets where we can all try our own things is probably the best chance the human race has. It’s an old science fiction idea and it’s one that especially appeals to those of us who long for the chance to establish a different sort of society than what the majority want here.

But as much as I’m eager for humans to explore space and find ways to live on other planets one day, I have to say that NASA isn’t the way to get it done. It’s become a political boondoggle that isn’t sure what it’s doing or why. It’s full of really bright people and it’s used a tremendous among of money, but I suspect we would have had more to show for it if space were left to private companies.

We have a number of private companies competing to launch satellites and even put up orbiting laboratories and more. (Here’s a list of some of the companies and their projects, although the list is out of date.) As long as NASA was around to suck up a huge percentage of the money that might be directed toward space, those companies were at a disadvantage. Now, anyone who has an interest in space — for exploration, research, tourism, mining or colonization — has a great incentive to support one of these companies or start his own. (That’s the first launch of SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 rocket.)

I have a tremendous amount of respect for much of the work that NASA has done, particularly in the early days. But it’s time for the agency to get out of the way and let competing private interests take over the skies. The shuttle program was an expensive (more than $200 billion) boondoggle, in terms of what it accomplished. Competing private companies can accomplish much more with a lot less money.

Best of all, the money they spend will be money that’s invested voluntarily, not money that’s coercively taken from those who don’t choose to pay.

So goodbye to Discovery and Atlantis and Endeavor. We honor you, Challenger and Columbia. But we’re excited about what might come about when the free market has the time to develop in space. We may not live in space before my lifetime is through, but we will some day, as long as the world doesn’t end first. When it happens, it will be because private interests take us there.

Note: As I was researching this, I found that Reason magazine had an issue geared toward the space program in February. If you’re interested, the articles are online now.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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