The Right Goes the Wrong Direction in Space
"Having seen in Tampa several days of celebration of American ideals such as individual initiatives, entrepreneurship, and enterprise, to actually read the core document put out by the party and its take on U.S. space policy was almost nauseating. I had truly hoped that the obvious and glaringly real rise of an incredible and dynamic commercial space industry that is almost completely U.S.-born and bred would be embraced as an icon of a new, can-do, Right Stuff kind of American spirit. (We call it NewSpace, by the way.)
Nope. Didn't happen. Not only does the platform not embrace NewSpace, not only does it not speak of a bold new partnership to open the frontier, but it ignores the economic star of space completely in favor of reorganizing the government bureaucracy now in charge. To those who wrote what I believe will come to be seen, in years to come, as one of the great failures of the free-enterprise right, there is no space but government space, and no space without government control. It is a disaster, a dead end, and an embarrassing throwback to a Cold War, command-economy mentality, and I am sad for my Republican friends who get what is happening in space and have to somehow defend such a document.
Yet it reflects the reality we see in Washington of late. A member of the Republican Party can sit in a hearing and decry in fiery rhetoric the socialist satan of state-based medicine, waxing poetic about individual mandates and markets. They then get up, walk down the hall into a hearing on national space policy, and not only embrace the idol of a socialist space program but attack the idea of empowering the people of America to open space themselves, or encouraging NASA to hand off operational tasks to companies who are proving themselves ready over and over to take on the job so that our explorers can get back to exploring."
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