Deficit Committee and Commercial Space

Keep Reaching for the Stars, opinion, Washington Post
“When President Obama’s bipartisan panel to reduce the federal budget deficit unveiled a proposal chock-full of deep spending cuts and tax increases last week, it sent ripples of angst across the country. The items that most set both Republican and Democrat hearts afire — Social Security retirement age increases, gas tax raises, military cutbacks — seemed to border on reasonable. But the one that got me was “eliminate funding for commercial spaceflight” to save $1.2 billion by 2015. I guess the post-Sputnik drive to have the best national space program in the world is officially being laid to rest. The panel obviously didn’t recall the White House’s reverence of “the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover” as stated on the front page of a 1958 booklet called “Introduction to Outer Space” which was produced to sell the idea of space exploration. Though Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, the panel’s co-chairs, acknowledged that commercial spaceflight is a “worthy goal,” they said they were unclear why the federal government should subsidize it.”