NASA and SpaceX by Jerry Brown

Success of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch is terrific news.Getting NASA out of the business of manned space flight is way overdue.

I'm a 71 year-old scientist/engineer who grew up dreaming of traveling to the moon. I can still recall the excitement I felt watching the 1950 movie "Destination Moon". So, no one was more thrilled when Neil Armstrong set foot on it. But even in the early stages of the space program, it was clear that the shuttle was a brute-force solution with no long-term future. This first became evident to me when I learned about the glued-on heat tiles that would have to be repaired in a labor-intensive process after each flight.

The vaunted economic and scientific benefits of past manned flight programs just don't hold up under any objective analysis of the results. As a working engineer, I could see that the PR about technology transfer to industry was a myth. For many years my associates and I received NASA publications intended to facilitate technology transfer. They were a joke. I can still recall one that described a leather harness for restraining mice during hypodermic injections. In fact, it's quite likely that the human and material resources consumed by the Apollo program and space station would have done more for scientific and economic progress if used for other purposes.

The best part of NASA is JPL. Their unmanned projects have made immense contributions to our knowledge of the cosmos. I'm content to have my tax dollars spent there.

Suspension of the Constellation program has no effect on our ability to continue defense-related programs. We will still have the ability to put up significant payloads such as communications and navigation satellites.

NASA has had 52 years to work on manned space flight. If there is real economic benefit in it, then private enterprise will find it while we put our public resources to better use in opening up other frontiers in science.