OK, I’ve gotten several interesting and thoughtful responses to my Fox column, so I’ll publish and respond here.

BTW, in response to popular demand and threatens of lynchings, I’m going to start using blockquotes for excerpts, rather than italics–I’m told that it’s easier on the eyes.

Scott Abercrombie writes:

I agree with you that competition is the way to go in space exploration. Unfortunately, there are many idiots out their who wouldn’t want us to be “insensitive to the feelings” of other nations. They would demand that we must continue sharing with the other nations in order to promote world harmony. To hell with that. Let’s bury them in our discarded booster rockets, then worry about their feelings.

Of course, that would all be a moot point if private industry took over space exploration. Then maybe we would see some real progress.

Yes, that’s another subject for another column–the fact that NASA itself doesn’t have any real domestic competition, and how we’ve locked ourselves (at least until now) into that situation.

By the way, you forgot that third primary fuel for human progress – pride. It seems to me that that is what got us to the moon, along with the fear you mentioned.

Perhaps, but it doesn’t seem all that effective since then. I don’t think we’re any less proud of our space program now than we were then–the difference was that, back then, we were scared. And we were really racing.

Steven Rogers says:

Though we both see the same problems, I do not see competition as a solution. The link between commerce and competition is a common fallacy that is best not perpetuated. The essence of commerce and capitalism is freedom of thought and action, not competition.

But freedom of thought and action will inevitably lead to competition (and also to cooperation, where it makes sense).

There is *always* competition, even in socialism, the mafia, totalitarian regimes, or bureaucracy. It is completely wrong to identify competition with capitalism or commerce (as the conservatives do). In our current space program, there is certainly intense competition within government agencies for budget dollars, competition within agencies to see who gets funded, and competition within the contractors for program funds. Competition itself won’t fix any problems.

Well, actually, that’s not true. Oh, it’s true that agencies compete for funding, but that’s not the kind of competition that I’m talking about. The socialist mindset in Washington sees competition among agencies as “needless duplication of effort.” One result of this in the 1990s was the granting of an exclusive charter to NASA for all resuable launch system development, with the Air Force responsible for expendables. This resulted in, among many other things, the X-33 fiasco.

Of course, the people who speak favorably of competition don’t mean *that* kind of competition – they mean the “good” kind. All this confusion about competition wouldn’t be necessary but for the fact that both liberals and conservatives don’t really want to name the issue at stake: freedom. If things are ever going to get better, we have to state out loud the real nature of the issues at hand.

I agree, but the fact remains that freedom generally results in competition. And anyway, it’s pointless to talk about freedom in the context of government space programs, but it is possible to talk about whether they are done cooperatively, or competitively with other nations. Of course my preference is for free markets in space. My column was in the much narrower context of what the goverment seems to be determined to do.

Capitalism is not primarily about competition – that happens in every social system. It is primarily about who makes the decisions about capital and risk. What capitalism brings (and what we need in the space business) is the ability for people to act on their own judgment. This includes those who want to explore space – they should be free to invest and profit by it. But it also includes those who do NOT want to invest in the space business and shouldn’t be forced to.

Again, possibly correct, but irrelevant to my point.

If we want space to be successful, that’s what we who are pro-space have to face up to. We have to demand the freedom to live by our own judgment, and also accept the responsibility for it and quit expecting a free ride from the taxpayers. If the space business rides the bureaucratic bandwagon and fights for a share of the tax loot, then it shouldn’t be a surprise to find that it has inherited the other problems that go with it – like having the space program being run as a money laundering outfit to funnel foreign aid money to Russia.

Of course. But that’s, as I said, a different column.

As far as I can tell, the Soviets won the space race. We were the first to the moon, but we have adopted the Soviet’s ideological approach to space. It is particularly disheartening to see the consequences of this in the intellectual leadership of what might someday be a space industry in America.

Now that’s actually an interesting point, and one that I hadn’t thought of in quite that way. I might even use it as a future column…

I got a very interesting email from France, from a Franck Marodon (at least that’s the name in the email address):

That was an interesting article you wrote. I am myself an aerospace engineer, and I can tell you you no longer have to fear anything from Europe in general and France in particular. The main problem I see in your article is that you consider competition between nations, rather than between teams. The point is, France has been leading the european launcher effort, sometimes with arrogance with respect to our german partners. This arrogance carries on to the point where the French space agencies dictate to the European Space Agency how to do launchers, and particularly what next-generation launchers should look like (partially reusable, vertical take-off rockets launched from Kourou, i.e. something that would not damage our current industry, rather than something efficient). But I’m sure there are plenty of German, British or other European engineers with interesting ideas which will unfortunately never make their way to ESA H.Q.(what about an air-breathing TSTO like the once envisioned “s