Freedom Line Blog

In an interview with CFIF, George Landrith, President of Frontiers of Freedom, discusses why the end of the space shuttle program and America’s dominance in space are huge mistakes.

Listen to the interview here.

Say you’re a career civil servant who’s looking for a way to package old wine in a new wine skin. You don’t have the budget for hiring hot marketing talent or revamping your website. What to do? Invite a flock of twitterers to tweet about your work. Of course, this strategy is probably a bit easier to implement if you’re a NASA scientist offering prime seating at a shuttle launch in exchange for good publicity in the form of electronic sentence fragments. If nothing else, it will probably be a better show than watching a delivery of supplies to the International Space Station.  To be sure, transparency in government is usually a good thing, but do we really need to spend taxpayer money sharing footage of the space equivalent of a trucker delivering goods to a grocery store?

While the future of space travel may be in the private sector (see the X Prize Foundation’s website), governments are still the main players in this day and age. That’s why it’s encouraging to see this ABC News report that the U.S. is considering delaying the retirement of the Space Shuttle.

Not that the shuttle is anything exciting. Space travel started losing its appeal when the focus became the International Space Station (a sort of floating UN with freeze-dried food) instead of missions of discovery. But with space becoming an issue tied in just as closely with national security as with science & technology, leaving the US dependent on an increasingly surly Russia for our trips to outer space was never a good idea.