Newt Gingrich - NASA
Summary
Congressman Gingrich is a strong advocate of space exploration, and has been involved in space travel for numerous years. While he supports space travel, he opposes the use of NASA and government space programs to achieve that goal. Instead, he has supported prizes for advancements in space travel and allowing private companies to go into space with less bureaucracy and safety requirements.
Congressman Gingrich opposed President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration that created the Constellation project. He has stated that NASA should be doing less expensive unmanned projects and private companies should be tasked with manned space exploration. Congressman Gingrich supported President Obama's revamping of the Constellation and his efforts to move NASA out of manned space flight.
The Space Review Interview
In May of 2006, Congressman Gingrich was interviewed by The Space Review and talked extensively about President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration, NASA, and the future of the US in space.
TSR: I recall you were connected to the L-5 Society years ago. How did that come about? What sparked your interest in space exploration?
Gingrich: I first became interested in space during the Sputnik era and began reading Missiles and Rockets Magazine when I was in the eighth grade.
TSR: In January, 2004, President Bush delivered a speech arguing the US should establish a base on the Moon and go on with manned flights to Mars. He also established what seemed to many to be a reasonable timetable, complete with benchmarks along the way. What is your position on the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE)?
Gingrich: I am for a dramatic increase in our efforts to reach out into space, but I am for doing virtually all of it outside of NASA through prizes and tax incentives. NASA is an aging, unimaginative, bureaucracy committed to over-engineering and risk-avoidance which is actually diverting resources from the achievements we need and stifling the entrepreneurial and risk-taking spirit necessary to lead in space exploration.
TSR: In that same speech, Mr. Bush held out the possibility of pursuing VSE with international partners. Given the history and cost overruns of the International Space Station project, what do you think of internationalizing VSE? On the other hand, ISS is flying, with a crew, and holding Antarctica as a sort of international trust seems to have worked well. Could that Antarctic model be applied to at least the early days of permanent habitation of Luna, and the initial period of manned Martian exploration?
Gingrich: I believe that incentives work as a means to inspire Americans to meet great challenges. If these pioneers want to achieve their goals with multinational companies, that is fine. I am, however, against government-to-government committee-led long-term bureaucratic models of non-achievement that waste resources and, even more importantly, waste time.
TSR: Some argue that in order for VSE to succeed over several years, and at least two presidencies, the private sector must be brought into the very heart of the effort. What do you think? If you support that, how could that be done? Should private, for profit corporations be given a voice in the decision-making process of the program? What kinds of legal rights should corporations that participate in the program be granted as incentives to encourage their participation? Should they, for example, be given tracts of land on the Moon, upon which they could establish mining operations, or hotels to attract tourists, or pharmaceutical research facilities and factories—much as railroad companies in the nineteenth century were given huge tracts of land in exchange for building railroads and helping to open the American West to settlement and commerce?
“I would gladly take a suborbital flight. We should seek to establish standards comparable to hang gliding or mountain climbing and allow adults to take recognized risks.”
Gingrich: We should have very large prizes for achievement. If you had priced the space station as a purely private achievement and paid for it only upon completion you could probably have had three or four companies building systems in one-third to one-fifth of the time for the same total amount of money or less. There ought to be tax credits for manufacturing in space and tax credits for developing commercial flights into near space for space tourism so we build a very robust launch program in the private sector. We need a lot of competitive players, not simply one or two cumbersome large bureaucratic government contractors.TSR: Would such an expansion of VSE to include the establishment of a capitalist economic system in the Earth-Moon system, for starters, require the negotiation of a new treaty to replace the 1967 Outer Space Treaty?
Gingrich: We should simply interpret the Treaty very broadly and state that in the absence of an international regime, people can pursue legitimate investment and development within national law.
TSR: Editorial writers around the country have already balked at the $104-billion price tag NASA recently put on the VSE, even though that’s spread over several years, especially given current budget deficits, the cost of the Iraq War, the cost of rebuilding after the Gulf hurricanes, the imminent retirement of baby boomers, etc. Do you think the politics generated by those factors will either kill VSE or drive it towards the model that embraces international partners, and, perhaps, brings private corporations into the project as junior partners?
Gingrich: We should get private entrepreneurs to cost out a non-government, non-committee planning competitive model. Look at what the X Prize has generated in private investment for a very modest but very honorable award.
TSR: Beyond participating in the VSE, what do you think of the current attempts to establish private space ventures? Do you worry that if the first suborbital flight carrying paying passengers ends tragically, the private push into space could be stopped dead in its tracks, even if the technology is in fact ready for such commercial use? Would you take such a flight?
Gingrich: I would gladly take a suborbital flight. We should seek to establish standards comparable to hang gliding or mountain climbing and allow adults to take recognized risks.
TSR: Space tourism has gotten most of the publicity in the area of private space ventures so far. Do you think space tourism will in fact be the driver that puts private companies into space in a major, visible way, or do you see some other industry leading the way out?
Gingrich: Space tourism will likely be a significant factor. With the right tax credits and prizes, manufacturing in space could play an even bigger role.
TSR: Many argue that the space program, and especially manned flight, has no real purpose. Many of those who make that argument see putting people on other worlds as something akin to a wildly expensive stunt. How do you see a vigorous space effort fitting into overall US economic strategy? By 2040, will humans be living and working on three worlds, plus platforms orbiting in free space? If so, how important will those far-flung activities be to the US economy, and to the general human economy?
Gingrich: For those who see manned space as having no role they would have thought the Wright Brothers were irrelevant in 1903. The human race has a destiny to spread across the solar system and then across the stars. I prefer that destiny be led by free people.
Bold Solutions for Space Exploration
In January of 2007, Congressman Gingrich wrote an article on the Human Events website noting bold solutions for numerous topics. One of these topics was space exploration.
Bold Solutions for Permanent Space-based Research and Exploration
NASA has become a slow and paper-dominated bureaucracy. It is proposing to spend billions very slowly and very bureaucratically. It will both waste the taxpayers' money and actually slow the speed of getting into space. A bold alternative solution would be to:
- Focus the NASA bureaucracy on science projects and inexpensive unmanned space exploration.
- Set aside the money currently allocated for manned space exploration for getting to the moon and Mars and turn it into prizes with bigger rewards for earlier achievements and smaller prizes for later achievements. Entrepreneurial startups and bold adventurers will get into space much faster and more excitingly than a government bureaucracy.
- Change the FAA and NASA rules to make it easy for entrepreneurs and explorers to get into space at a much higher risk than we would tolerate for government programs. Establish an equivalency with mountain climbing as an acceptable risk informed adults could take in space launches.
Obama's Brave Reboot
In February of 2010, Congressman Gingrich wrote an article for the Washington Times in which he discussed his support for President Obama's recent overhaul of the Constellation program as defined in President Bush's Vision for Space Exploration.
Despite the shrieks you might have heard from a few special interests, the Obama administration’s budget for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration deserves strong approval from Republicans. The 2011 spending plan for the space agency does what is obvious to anyone who cares about man’s future in space and what presidential commissions have been recommending for nearly a decade.
The Commission on the Future of the United States Aerospace Industry in 2002 suggested that greater commercial activity in space was the proper way forward. The Aldridge Commission of 2004, headed by former Secretary of the Air Force Edward C. “Pete” Aldridge, made clear that the only way NASA could achieve success with President George W. Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration was to expand the space enterprise with greater use of commercial assets. Most recently, the Augustine Commission, headed by Norman R. Augustine, former chief executive of Lockheed Martin, made clear that commercial providers of space-launch services were a necessary part of maintaining space leadership for the United States.
NASA consistently ignored or rejected the advice provided to it by outside experts. The internal culture within the agency was actively hostile to commercial enterprise. A belief had grown from the days when the Apollo program landed humans on the moon that only NASA could do space well and therefore only NASA projects and programs were worthy. To his credit, former NASA Administrator Michael Griffin adopted a program to begin to access commercial companies for hauling cargo to the International Space Station. That program existed alongside the much larger effort to build a new generation of space vehicles designed to take us back to the moon. It has been under constant financial pressure because of the cost overruns in the moon mission, called Constellation.
With the new NASA budget, the leadership of the agency is attempting to refocus the manned space program along the lines that successive panels of experts have recommended. The space shuttle program, which was scheduled to end, largely for safety reasons, will be terminated as scheduled. The Constellation program also will be terminated, mostly because its ongoing costs cannot by absorbed within projected NASA budget limits. The International Space Station will have its life extended to at least 2020, thereby preserving a $100 billion laboratory asset that otherwise was due to be dumped in the Pacific Ocean by middecade. The budget also sets forth an aggressive program for having cargo and astronaut crews delivered to the space station by commercial providers.
The use of commercial launch companies to carry cargo and crews into low earth orbit will be controversial, but it should not be. The launch-vehicle portion of the Constellation program was so far behind schedule that the United States was not going to have independent access for humans into space for at least five years after the shutdown of the shuttle. We were going to rely upon the Russians to deliver our astronaut personnel to orbit. We have long had a cooperative arrangement with the Russians for space transportation but always have possessed our own capability. The use of commercial carriers in the years ahead will preserve that kind of independent American access.
Reliance on commercial launch services will provide many other benefits. It will open the doors to more people having the opportunity to go to space. It has the potential of creating thousands of new jobs, largely the kind of high-tech work to which our nation should aspire. In the same way the railroads opened the American West, commercial access can open vast new opportunities in space. All of this new activity will expand the space enterprise, and in doing so, will improve the economic competitiveness of our country.
Critics likely will raise the issue of safety and reliability. However, there already are rockets in the American inventory that are trusted by our government to launch billion-dollar satellites and have proved to be quite reliable. Those vehicles can be modified to carry human crews safely. New rockets under development have been designed from the outset with manned missions in mind, and with the assurance of NASA business, necessary large-scale development can be done so they can be added to the commercial inventory. The plan is to have both NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration provide licensing oversight, determine safety requirements and approve all launches.
But the ambition of the NASA leadership is much larger. Getting the agency out of the low-earth-orbit launch business frees up budget to do other exciting and valuable things. It permits development work to start in earnest on a heavy-lift launch vehicle capable of solar-system exploration. It enables expansion of the aeronautics budget, particularly in helping develop the next-generation air-traffic-control system, a technological goal that will pay huge dividends to the United States. It will permit new investments in robotic space missions and Earth science missions. In essence, the new spending plan takes NASA back to its roots of advanced technology development, experimentation and exploration.
Bipartisan cooperation has been difficult to achieve in Congress, but here is a chance. By looking forward, NASA has given us a way to move forward. It deserves broad support for daring to challenge the status quo. It has proposed the real change that Americans are seeking.
New Hampshire Debate
In June of 2011, Congressman Gingrich participated in the Republican Primary debate in New Hampshire. He stated that bureaucracy cannot innovate and NASA was standing in the way of the private sector.
MACKIN: Thanks, John. This question goes out to Speaker Gingrich. Next month, the space shuttle program is scheduled to retire after 30 years, and last year, President Obama effectively killed government-run space flight to the International Space Station and wants to turn it over to private companies. In the meantime, U.S. astronauts would ride Russian spacecraft at a cost of $50 million to $63 million a seat. What role should the government play in future space exploration?
GINGRICH: Well, sadly -- and I say this, sadly, because I'm a big fan of going into space and I actually worked to get the shuttle program to survive at one point -- NASA has become an absolute case study in why bureaucracy can't innovate.
If you take all the money we've spent at NASA since we landed on the moon and you had applied that money for incentives to the private sector, we would today probably have a permanent station on the moon, three or four permanent stations in space, a new generation of lift vehicles. And instead, what we've had is bureaucracy after bureaucracy after bureaucracy and failure after failure.
I think it's a tragedy, because younger Americans ought to have the excitement of thinking that they, too, could be part of reaching out to a new frontier.
You know, you'd asked earlier, John, about this idea of limits because we're a developed country. We're not a developed country. The scientific future is going to open up, and we're at the beginning of a whole new cycle of extraordinary opportunities. And, unfortunately, NASA is standing in the way of it, when NASA ought to be getting out of the way and encouraging the private sector.
KING: Is there any candidate who would step in and say, no, this is vital to America's identity, this is vital to America's innovation, I want the government to stay in the lead here when it comes to manned space flight? Nobody?
PAWLENTY: Yeah, I think the space program has played a vital role for the United States of America. I think in the context...
KING: But can we afford it going forward?
PAWLENTY: In the context of our budget challenges, it can be refocused and reprioritized, but I don't think we should be eliminating the space program. We can partner with private providers to get more economies of scale and scale it back, but I don't think we should eliminate the space program.
KING: In a sentence -- in a sentence or two?
(CROSSTALK)
GINGRICH: John, you mischaracterized me. I didn't say end the space program. We built the transcontinental railroads without a national department of railroads. I said you could get into space faster, better, more effectively, more creatively if you decentralized it, got it out of Washington, and cut out the bureaucracy. It's not about getting rid of the space program; it's about getting to a real space program that works.
Sponsored and Cosponsored Legislation
This representative has not been identified as sponsoring or cosponsoring significant legislation related to this title.
References
[1] Website: The Space Review Article: A few words with Newt Gingrich Author: Gregory Anderson Accessed on: 05/19/2011
[2] Website: The Washington Times Article: Obama’s brave reboot for NASA Author: Congressman Newt Gingrich; Congressman Robert Walker Accessed on: 05/19/2011