Evan’s Bookshelf: Dark Side of the Moon

For the past week I’ve been reading Dark Side of the Moon: The Magnificent Madness of the American Lunar Quest, an engaging revisionist history of the manned space program by Gerard J. DeGroot. DeGroot’s main argument is that while the development of space technology like satellites, planetary probes, and space telescopes has been useful and productive for humanity, the manned space program was a colossal waste of money driven by several factors: misinformed anticommunism (we were actually way ahead in the “space race,” even though the Soviets hit most of the “first” milestones), military-industrial interests (lots of jobs at McDonnell, Grumman, and Northrop emerged from the space race, not to mention the massive civilian growth of NASA), flights of fancy (the space-travel fantasies of boosters–no pun intended–like Wernher von Braun), and finally, a desire for prestige.

The moon shot was the great pinnacle of the prestige drive. DeGroot documents over and over how genuine scientific interests were neglected in the pursuit of the immensely complicated task of sending a man to the moon and bringing him back. “As Johnson had outlined in his memo, the main reason to go to the Moon, or indeed to do anything in space, was prestige,” DeGroot writes. “Americans feared that Soviet space exploits would damage the reputation of the United States and cause countries around the world to go communist.” He quotes numerous officials and journalists of the day making explicit the role of prestige in the manned space program.

He also quotes persuasive critics of this government-run prestige program like William F. Buckley:

We do not need galactic bombast to prove to the people of the world that ours is a superior society to the Soviet Union’s: we could, had we the imagination to do so, prove that point again and again, profoundly and convincingly, if we could only free ourselves from the inferiority complex to which we have been enslaved for years.

and Dwight Eisenhower:

Why the great hurry to get to the moon and planets? . . . Let us point to our industrial and agricultural productivity; why let the Communists dictate the terms of all the all the contests? . . . [i]n everything except the power of our booster rockets we are leading the world in scientific space exploration. From here on, I think we should proceed in an orderly, scientific way, building one accomplishment on another, rather than engaging in a mad effort to win a stunt race.

The manned space race, driven by a misguided desire for prestige, cost (through the end of Apollo) $26.6 billion. It created a massive space bureaucracy that found, after Apollo, little purpose but continued to spend billions on literal holding patterns: space stations and the Shuttle.

And what if the massive space bureaucracy actually inhibited private spaceflight innovations? How much could have been accomplished had there been no NASA to monopolize space travel? No one will ever be able to measure the opportunity cost of NASA’s manned space program to other ventures. Dark Side of the Moon makes a fine case that this accounting need not have been made.

Aviation policy, too, is often driven by the prestige impulse. Prestige has driven airport policy, route incentives, open skies, and many other issues. It remains to be seen that prestige ever has a compelling policy rationale.