NASA’s New Mission
A post-Goldin, post-911 vision.

By Eli Lehrer, senior editor, The American Enterprise
October 19, 2001 9:00 a.m.

aniel S. Goldin, the hard-driving bureaucrat who saved America's space program, announced Wednesday that he would resign as NASA administrator. First appointed in the spring of 1992 under George H. W. Bush, Goldin served longer than any other high-ranking federal official currently in office.

As the longest-serving NASA administrator in history, Goldin compiled an impressive record at the space agency's helm. Under his leadership NASA tripled the number of scientific spacecraft in orbit around the earth, produced the best-yet maps of Mars, the Moon, and Venus, returned scads of data about Jupiter and its moons, launched an ambitious mission to Saturn, vastly expanded our knowledge of asteroids, and began construction on a long-delayed space station. The agency also scored a number of public-relations coups: It arranged a Mars landing for July 4th, sent John Glenn back into space, and won geopolitical brownie points by sending American astronauts to Russia's creaky, dangerous Mir station. As the first NASA administrator from a background in private-sector space development — he headed TRW's space division before taking the helm at NASA — Goldin made the space agency run more like a business. He handed over space-shuttle operations to a private-sector consortium, cut $40 billion from the NASA budget and axed about a third of the space agency's bureaucrats while still carrying out more missions. He also knew when to get out of the way: NASA stopped much of its corporate-welfare work and thus helped to expand the commercial space industry. Goldin even grudgingly allowed billionaire Dennis Tito to usher in the age of space tourism by hitching a very costly ride on a Russian space capsule. For an agency that failed to execute any planetary missions between 1978 and 1989 and had a manned space program so aimless many wanted to abolish it, Goldin's time at the helm represents a stunning success.

Goldin's tenure, however, saw plenty of failures. Efforts to do more science with less money — the "cheaper, faster, better" approach as Goldin called it — resulted in the loss of two Mars probes. While nearly everyone can agree that some science is better than none, scientists privately grouse about the dated instruments Goldin's low budgets forced them to use. The space station, plagued by delays, cost overruns and Russian foot-dragging, will achieve very modest science objectives at immense cost. Goldin's personal style, likewise, proved so hard driving and autocratic and even his own PR flacks sometimes complained about it. Surviving for ten years in a high-profile job required a willingness to play political games: Goldin helped insure the space station's survival by finding contractors in all 435 House districts and spent millions of dollars to realize Al Gore's mad-scientist dream of launching a TV camera into space to transmit a continuous image of earth over the Internet. (One can easily imagine Gore hugging a computer monitor with an image of the earth and shouting "Mine! Mine! All mine!")

Goldin never succeeded in remaking the agency altogether. The space shuttle, intended as a cheap, safe way to bring people, has turned out to be costly and dangerous and, after spending over $1 billion, Goldin scraped plans to replace it. Although president H. W. Bush wanted to send people to Mars, a manned mission to the fourth planet doesn't seem any closer than it was when Goldin took over. While NASA has become a well-run government bureaucracy, its modest Goldin-era goals of building an orbiting lab, bringing mars rocks to earth and scouring comets and asteroids for clues about the solar system's origins hardly stir the heart.

During his time at the helm, Goldin gave NASA some sense of purpose during what history will recall as an introspective era of when missing interns and illiterate wife-killing football players made the biggest headlines. Today, America needs more than that. The Apollo program demonstrated that a liberal, capitalist society could do just as well as a totalitarian Communist one when it came to achieving vast national goals. Today, a commitment to space exploration highlights the most important differences between the United States and the terrorists who seek to destroy it. Islamic terrorists believe that their narrow teachings provide answers to all questions and seek to annihilate anyone who disagrees. They despise frontiers of all kinds as much as they hate freedom itself. Communists, while contemptuous of liberal freedoms, at least shared an ideological commitment to human progress. Space offers an immense frontier: successful exploration will yield immense mineral wealth, spur enormous advances in technology and, in time, unlock the secret of mankind's origin. Space exploration demonstrates the difference between the future Americans envision and the one its enemies seek to impose.

Goldin provided clearheaded, competent management but did little to produce dramatic change or set major objectives. While Congress would do well to fund some modest budget increases — particularly for hard science — nobody suggests that NASA go back to the free-flowing money spigot of the mid-1960s. President Bush and his next NASA administrator should select one difficult-but-not-impossible goal and commit both the space agency and nation to realizing it. Bush should find a new NASA administrator with Dan Goldin's bureaucratic acumen and a compelling vision that will awaken Americans' frontier spirit.