Comedian and social commentator Bill Maher does a great bit, funny to some and offensive to others, where he compares and contrasts religious extremists from various faiths and nations. He concludes, with no small degree of razor sharp humor, that a political system like ours, one that allows women to vote and endows all citizens with equally inalienable rights, isn't just different from those where women or minorities are second class citizens, it's fundamentally better.
I thought about Maher's bit while I was at the Space Economy Leadership Summit this week in Austin. May seem worlds apart, but indulge me ...
Maher brings up a salient point, one that goes beyond religion or ideology. Some ways of doing things are just better. In science, the metric system isn't just different from the f-p-s system, it's qualitatively better. The familiar so-called Arabic numeral system now used world-wide is simply better than the ancient Roman numerals it replaced. But we have to be careful about applying that format too broadly, it's not always accurate. Yellow isn't better than green, they really are just different.
Free market proponents will often argue, universally, that the private sector isn't just different from the public sector, it's better. Other analysts disagree, arguing that it's the public sector that's better than the private. Both sides make great points using specific examples. But the truth is more complicated, and in specific cases those universal claims break down so completely that the cost for rigidly following either one exclusively would be tragic on the individual and national level.
The popular program Deadliest Catch and the Coast Guard offer a great example. The Coast Guard doesn't maintain and staff a fleet of ships and aircraft 24/7 to rescue crab fishermen in the Bering Sea because it's profitable. Quite the opposite: it's incredibly expensive. They do it because saving lives and enabling the private sector is deemed by We the People, though our elected representatives, to be a public good.
There's a debate every election year about what may or may not warrant being deemed good for the public. It's not profitable to insure sick or injured people. It's not profitable to deliver that last piece of mail to the last box on a rural road for fifty cents. But in the Coast Guard example, I think most people, conservatives and progressives, would agree there's a lot of good there, beyond the obvious. In addition to the moral imperative of saving human life, the Coast Guard directly buys helicopters and uses them to facilitate industries like crab fishing, all of which benefits private sector manufacturing and services, which in turn provides private sector jobs. But the private sector isn't better than the Coast Guard, it's just different. In fact the result of both working in symbiosis not only makes the modern Coast Guard possible, it creates an ongoing process where aircraft designs and the Coast Guard both get better.
Imagine instead that the Coast Guard was stuck choosing between only three government designed helicopter prototypes, that had each flown only ten times with mixed results. How much would that cost? How safe or effective would those choppers be? Or what if the Coast Guard had to be profitable? We might end up with a situation like the one illustrated left.
This is a useful illustration of the recent change in policy announced for NASA. Informed by the Augustine Commission, the OSTP and the WH have seemingly settled on a policy of investing in commercial space companies in hope of lowering the cost of building and flying the next generation of spacecraft. The industry is collectively referred to as Newspace.
There is no hard and fast definition of Newspace. We can however distinguish between the cost-plus contracting that is typically done by the large contractors and commercialization of spaceflight. Newspace products are designed, developed, owned, and operated by the private sector, with the use of private investment, and the spacecraft and services are developed with multiple customers in mind. Like the government, private researchers and privately funded astronauts, and pure space tourism.
The government can serve the public and encourage the best of the free market with public projects and services that create a market for products that are profitable which otherwise would not exist. That's the whole dea behind government investment in Newspace: to create a symbiotic relationship where both NASA and commercial spacecraft get better.
What's true for Coast Guard helicopters and cell phones may work out in space. The private sector isn't always better than the public one, in many cases they really are just different, and in some cases we benefit enormously from the combination of both of them. Knocking out one of them and expecting the nation to move forward on the remainder would be as foolish as amputating one of Lady Liberty's legs and expecting her to march on faster than ever.