Shelby Was For The Private Sector Before He Was Against It

Because NASA is like the military, it is of such long term strategic importance, you can't privatize something like that to the degree Obama wishes. Many other portions of the economy, yeah you can privatize considerably if not completely.

NASA is in a the game of exploration and it is of long term value to America, that doesn't fit the quarterly report rquirements of private industry.

This isn't for it before he was against it.

Private industry cannot replace the big jobs and focus that NASA does. They are playing two different games, yes similar, yes there is cross over and should be. But Obama is very very wrong.
He wants a political payoff NOW for his policy, handing out the bucks to get a payoff in his term.
NOt sticking with the plans of return to moon that won't pay off for him. It's so obvious.

I'm tired of hearing the argument that wanted to save NASA is being against the private sector. The vast majority of NASA spending is on contracts with the private sector! Hello? ATK builds the first stage, Lockheed builds Orion, etc. In my branch there are maybe 5-6 civil servants and almost 25 contractors!

The contractors, i.e the private sector, will be the first ones to lose their jobs. The civil servants are all perm gov employees.

Is it just me or did that particular rant seem to be mostly cut and paste from previous releases?

At least his amazing Ares I hagiography should provide considerable entertainment as the negotiations proceed :)

It says he was for creating jobs in the private sector. Not space jobs for the private sector. He also mentions sustained growth, NASA is not about sustained growth or profitability, the budget has been flat for many years. I don't find him in any way relating his quote to NASA. Jeez, I want jobs for the private sector too, but not by privatizing our military (for example).

Plus, isn't Nasa 80% private sector jobs? So, how does terminating one contract (private jobs) and giving the money to a different private company do anything other than move money and private jobs from ATK to SpaceX? Or from USA to Orbital?
It just moves money and bodies around, it doesn't create anything new.

It does start the bidding all over, the RFP's all over, brings everything back to the drawing board and square one.

Then, imagine the scenario like Grumman and Boeing had over tanker. There was a protest and now the plane is years behind schedule because it's tied up in legal rangling.

This smells of B.O.

I don't really know, or care, about Shelby's positions on things. But there's nothing inherently contradictory about these quoted positions.

The former quote is arguing against Keynesian macroeconomic intervention (e.g. "government spending, regardless of where it is spent, will improve the economy") by stating that real economic growth comes from the private, and not public, sector. If anything, you should criticize this because his conclusion doesn't support his premise. There's no real debate in economics that economic growth has to come from the private sector -- that's always the case in any economy that's not a demand economy. There are certainly times when Keynesian intervention isn't prudent -- but he doesn't seem to be articulating anything indicated that we are in such a time.

Nonetheless, the latter comment doesn't conflict with his general idea expressed in the first comment at all. Just because GENERALLY the private sphere is better positioned to do something doesn't mean it is ALWAYS better. I strongly doubt that you're asserting that Shelby is an absolutist demanding an end to all government. If Shelby were arguing against a proposal that the Army be privatized and subcontracted out to the private sector, would you be making the same "two-faced" assertion? I don't think anyone else would. Feeling that New Space Vision #13 (or whatever we're up to now) is better implemented by the public sector doesn't conflict with the concept that economic stimulus is best aimed at encouraging private sector growth. At all.

I agree with you. The idea of privatizing space is ridiculous, it is a money losing endeavor, that no company can sustain. Now if the government wanted to use private companies as contractors for all R&D programs I do think that might be more efficient, but they would still need to government to foot the entire bill for development and operations. Otherwise the company would go bankrupt in a short period of time. In essence they would need to use companies as replacements for MFC, GRC and other NASA center, but still be government funded. I think we have already been allocated enough to go to the moon, but to satisfy politicians from every state with a NASA center they divided the money so thin between so many centers (some of which were science directorates not engineering directorates) that by the time each center had their budget it was not enough to do something serious with. Having companies take on this role might alleviate that problem.

This is not privatizing space. It is breaking NASA's stranglehold on putting humans in orbit, something industry is certainly capable of doing as a service rather than an in-house capability. The biggest lesson that most don't seem to have learned from Shuttle is that when NASA spends all its money on operations, it doesn't have money for R&D to advance the state-of-the-art. That is why we have been stagnant in LEO, not because that's as far as the Shuttle can fly. Had the Shuttle flown once a week for $10 million per flight as planned, we could've put millions of pounds into orbit every year, built several LEO space stations and colonized the moon. But we didn't have any money to do any of that other stuff because Shuttle was too expensive to operate and we couldn't afford anything else. That is where Constellation was headed. Another 30 years in LEO with Orion because we wouldn't be able to afford Ares V, or EDS, or Altair. Worse still, the ISS would have been abandoned years before it would ever fly. It was all a pipe dream. Poorly conceived, underfunded, overbudget and behind schedule; that was Constellation. My biggest fear is that Congress will reverse this forward-looking proposal and fully fund Constellation. NASA will remain a jobs program for civil servants with contractors under their thumb rather than purchasing services from industry. With this mentality, 100 years after Kitty Hawk there would be one government airline flying 20 flights per day between major cities for $100,000 per ticket. Anyone who believes the Constellation architecture was going anywhere is delusional.