On the 45th anniversary of the first flight to land humans on the moon, a new book explains why we haven’t been back there or anywhere beyond earth orbit in over four decades, and why the US is dependent on Russia for access to its own space station.
“Since the end of Apollo, space hasn’t been considered important enough to risk human life. The House recently passed a NASA authorization bill that said ‘safety is the highest priority.’ That means that everything else, including actual spaceflight, is a lower one. We’re apparently willing to spend billions on it, but that’s for jobs, not actual progress in space,” says Rand Simberg, author of the new book, Safe Is Not An Option: Overcoming The Futile Obsession With Getting Everyone Back Alive That Is Killing Our Expansion Into Space.
“Despite the fact that, to get our astronauts to ISS, we have to send millions of taxpayer dollars to Russia, which continues to act against our national interests, there seems to be no hurry to end our dependence on them. It’s apparently more important to Congress to not possibly lose an astronaut than to regain control of our own space destiny. Congress underfunds Commercial Crew and insists that NASA continue to develop it the old, expensive slow way that killed fourteen astronauts anyway, in the name of ‘safety.'”
He points out that had the US taken this safety obsession as seriously in the 1960s, it wouldn’t have sent astronauts around the moon in 1968, when the US won the space race, let alone landing them in 1969. “Buzz and Neil thought they had maybe a 50-50 chance of success, but they went, because it was important,” Simberg says. “If I were an astronaut today, I’d be outraged at Congress, that thinks I don’t have ‘the right stuff’ to support my country in space, or that what I’m doing is so trivial it’s not worth the risk.”
The book notes that space is the harshest frontier that humanity has ever faced in its history, and it is unrealistic to think that it will be opened for development and settlement without the loss of human life, any more than any previous one was. Simberg elaborates, “I’m not saying that we should be trying to kill people in space, or be reckless, any more than I like to see people die on the highways. But the only way to not have people die in space is to not send them. We should be doing so much there that deaths are just as inevitable as they are in any other human endeavor.”
Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer with over a third of a century of experience in the space industry. He holds multiple engineering degrees from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and West Coast University in Los Angeles. He has accumulated over a decade in engineering and management at the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California and with Rockwell International in Downey, California. Since 1993, he has been an entrepreneur and consultant in space technology and business development, as well as regulatory and market issues relating to commercial and personal spaceflight.
Mr. Simberg is an adjunct scholar with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and has written many pieces for Popular Mechanics, Fox News, America Online, PJMedia, National Review, Reason magazine, The Weekly Standard, the Washington Times, TCSDaily, among others. He has also written extensive essays on space policy and technology for the quarterly journal The New Atlantis.