NASA and Robert Bigelow–An Ongoing Relationship
Robert Bigelow, President and CEO of Bigelow Aerospace, opened up his speech on August 25, 1999 at the NASA HabModule Commercialization Conference, Houston, Texas, with his first two questions, “What does NASA want to accomplish” and “What are NASA’s current motivations for commercializing space? Why now?” The reason these questions were asked was to address the general public’s involvement with space, an involvement which Russia and NASA had controlled since the beginning of the space race began a little over 50 years ago.
According to Robert Bigelow, the 10th Amendment of the Bill of Rights states there is “no legal authority empowering a federal agency allowing that agency to be in a ‘business’ activity unless otherwise specified by the United States Constitution.” He went further to address this issue by saying, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are reserved to the States, respectively, or to the people.” His overall outlook on this is “if” NASA has a sincere desire to commercialize and privatize space, they cannot be the owner of their space agency but its loyal customer.
He feels, and has demonstrated with his own space tourism ventures, the privatizing of space is to connect better with the people of the world—not to exclude them in order to wine and dine only the rich and wealthy that would benefit space investments. Yet NASA is a publically-funded group which has turned their back on the public. Robert Bigelow feels that instead of a continuously shrinking budget, which is NASA’s present on-going financial state, the budget will grow as the numbers of launches grow—for many reasons:
• Massive establishment of an investment magnet
o Establishment of the first country to use “private ownership” business structure
o Commercialization and privatizing space will cause this investment
o Number of launches annually will increase every year
o Amount of payload diversities will increase
o The price per launch will control the investment, not the price per pound
Once the connection to the people is accomplished, these same people will be behind Congress to support space investments and research projects—when budgets and budget changes are requested, they are more apt to go through due to the support of the average people on a larger scale. Why? Because they can see a growing budget instead of one always being scrutinized for serious financial blunders, becoming the laughing stock of the world–”How many years have we spent working on that telescope at millions of dollars—and NOW you find you do not have room aboard the shuttle?” Their path is full of cancelled contract, dead-end projects, and financial issues and oversights. Maybe it would be a good idea to have someone like Robert Bigelow lead their way for a short time to get them out of the dork…oh…sorry, I meant dark.
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