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American Morning

Is International Space Station Worth Your Tax Dollars?

Aired September 06, 2001 - 09:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
JEANNE MESERVE, CNN ANCHOR: This morning, we're talking space. CNN has taken its viewers on the first-ever live tour of the International Space Station. It is an impressive and huge investment, but is it worth your tax dollars? Joining us live from Washington are Edward Hudgins, director of regulatory studies at the Cato Institute, and John Logsdon, director of George Washington University's Center for International Science and Technology Policy and Space Policy Institute, and our resident space expert, CNN space correspondent Miles O'Brien, is also in on this debate.

Mister Hudgins, let me start with you. We've seen the bells and the whistles and the science. Should U.S. taxpayers be paying for this?

ED HUDGINS, CATO INSTITUTE: I think not. I think space is very important. The exploitation of space is very important, so important that the government shouldn't be doing it. That's the problem. Consider, the space station is a great technological achievement. But it started out valued in the 1980s, assuming it would cost about $8 billion and have a crew of 12. Now it's been downsized to a crew of three that's not going to be able to do much science at all, and the cost, according to the GAO, is going to be as much as $50 billion. So my complaint is that we're not getting the bang for the buck.

Compare to fact that private called Mir Corp, which is private Western investors and a mostly privatized Russian space agency, announced a few days ago they're going to put up a mini space station for around $100 million, where tourist can go, and science can be done et cetera, et cetera. So my complaint is we have to get the private sector in there more to bring down the cost, rather than let the government do it.

MESERVE: Mr. Logsdon, what do you think? Is this a viable commercial enterprise?

JOHN LOGSDON, SPACE POLICY INST.: Well, I don't think commerce is what this is about. The space station is a research laboratory. We do research for a variety of reasons. One of which is eventual profit. So current planning, current hopes, are about 30 percent of the space station will be used for commercial purposes, but the other 70 percent, and I think that justifies public funding, will be used for publicly-funded science, for science to improve human health, human welfare.

MESERVE: But, Mr. Logsdon, is as much science being done as on the space station as was originally hoped?

LOGSDON: Well, it's too early to answer that question. I mean, the program is not an example of government at its best. Nobody will claim that. There is this debate now of how much station we're going to build, because of the cost overruns. I myself think, if we limit it to three crew, it would be tragedy. We have to get back to enough people, enough equipment, enough time to do the science, after we finish building it. We are still just building the thing.

HUDGINS: But what's interesting there is even here the private sector can, perhaps help out. For example, the Russians have been the real entrepreneurs. The Russians not only took money to bring Dennis Tito up. The Russians not only have started this private space station venture. The Russians contracted with a private American company called Space Hab to put a commercial module on their side of station. And Space Hab perhaps could provide another module to provide more room for crews. In other words, the private sector would be getting involved.

What I would like to see, is that when the station is completed, it either be privatizied. That is the keys literally be turned over to the private sector, or if that's not possible, make it into kind of a Port Authority arrangement, like airports, that are owned by government, but all of the services provided by the private sector. We do private transportation to the station, private contracting out, experiments, all of those kinds of things, because it's the private sector that brings down the prices.

MESERVE: Let's let Miles O'Brien jump in here, too -- Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN SPACE CORRESPONDENT: I've got to ask the question about the commercialization of space. I mean, we have been talking about the commercialization of space since the first shots were ever attempted, and yet, the business models don't add up. Even when you talk about Mir Corp, yes, they were able to successfully broker the deal to get Dennis Tito into space, but the fact remains, they leased out the Mir space station and were unable to make their payments. It's a business model that don't work well. Doesn't the government have an appropriate role here?

LOGSDON: After all, you talk about privatizing the space station. Maybe that will happen. Maybe it should happen. But first you have to build it. It's government money to build it. So, you know, there's -- this phantom idea that there's this great commercial potential in space if only the government out of the way. I think the right model -- if you think about it is a partnership between government industry to open up the frontier, but government involvement is like building highways. It's like the Lewis and Clark exploration. I mean, this is a government role, to get started and bring the private sector along.

O'BRIEN: But don't you think, Professor Logsdon, that NASA has a hard time with this role. Historically, it hasn't had to share, if it will, and create these sorts of partnerships. So it's difficult for the agency, in some cases there are legislative constraints and some cases it's cultural. LOGSDON: Exactly. I mean, NASA has a hard time letting go. It's an organization that needs to change, that's one of the things that Dan Goldman has tried to do with mixed success, is get the organization more oriented towards commercial partnerships. It's a long fight, you know, a gradual change, and I'd be the last one to say that it's successful at this point.

HUDGINS: But To Miles' point about cost, a lot of that is because NASA, rather than contracting out, after Apollo basically stayed in the space business. For example, in the 1920s and '30s the federal government, the postal service, rather than fly their own planes and higher their own pilots, simply contracted out for services with the private sector, specifically air mail. OK? And that's one of the reasons why the cost of putting something into space has gone up compared to the cost of computers, which have gone down, software, which has gone down, flying, which has gone down, maritime shipping, which has gone down.

I mean, consider this: This is the shuttle. There -- you know, there are -- have been plans people have talked about to take this external fuel tank and put it into orbit because the thing files 98 percent of the distance into space and then the tank falls off and basically burns up in the atmosphere. We could have these orbiting platforms up there that the private sector could make into orbiting hotel or honeymoon suites.

There are lots of innovative ideas out there in the private sector and I'd like to see NASA step back.

And by the way, one of the other things, remember, is it still takes about six months to get permission to launch a private rocket. Most businesses would like a turnaround time or a month or two. So the regulatory burden on the private sector right now is still a very serious problem, as our export controls, which made it very difficult and possible for MirCorp to export the things they needed to keep that Mir space station up when the station was still up.

MESERVE: Mr. Logsdon, the last question for you: Given the limited number of federal dollars that are available, is this space station the right place for NASA to be putting its money?

LOGSDON: Well, the space station is only one of NASA's programs. It's a $2 billion dollar program out of a $14 billion dollar budget. I mean, NASA does science, it does advanced technology development, and it's building this research laboratory, this platform in space.

So I think that the NASA portfolio is properly balanced. I -- we have to get through this construction of the station and then see what the country wants out of its space agency for the future.

MESERVE: And we have to leave it there.

John Logsdon and Edward Hudgins, thank you both for joining us. And Miles, you too. Always appreciate it.

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