SPACE - DOMESTIC POLICYRon Paul Presidential Campaign

Position Paper

(1988)

Time after time NASA has developed capabilities at great expense then discarded them: a space station larger than the Soviet MIR, a heavy lift vehicle competitive with the new Soviet Energia, a nuclear engine twice as efficient as the space shuttle main engine and a well tested Earth-Moon transport.

The fate of the Saturn V heavy lift launch vehicle is one of the saddest examples of this folly. Production was intentionally halted and portions of its tooling were "lost". This bridge burning ensured support for the next aerospace welfare program: the space shuttle. Now we have a grounded government shuttle that can lift a third as much as the Saturn V for the same cost per pound. That's progress, government style.

Even worse, this failed state monopoly is now wrecking businesses to avoid well deserved embarassment. American companies desperately need to get their satellites into space. They have been blocked from using the cheapest, most reliable launcher in the world which unfortuneately happens to be the Soviet Proton.

NASA has cost our nation a full twenty years in space development, twenty years that has seen the Soviet Union surpass us to an extent that may well be irreparable. It is inconceivable that a private firm could have committed such follies and survived. NASA deserves no better.

Our only hope now lies in the power of free individuals risking their own resources for their own dreams. We must recognize the government led space program is dead and the corpse must be buried as soon as possible. Any defense functions should be put under the military, and the rest of NASA should be sold to private operators. The reciepts would be applied to the national debt. Then, all government roadblocks to commercial development of space must be removed.

It is not the business of the defense department of a free society to veto business decisions of remote sensing or launch companies. The interests of liberty would be well served by a bevy of mediasats that will put any future Iran-Contra affair under the full glare of live television coverage. Maybe, besides competition, that's what our government is afraid of.

There is really only one proper role for the military in space or on Earth: the protection of America. Otherwise, the new fronteir of Space should be opened to all. Space pioneers will generate knowledge and wealth that will improve the lot of all people on earth. We should not let government get in their way.
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SPACE - INTERNATIONAL POLICY

Ron Paul Presidential Campaign

Position Paper

(1988)

Our government is not only shortsighted in it's negotiations on space issues, it's downright anti-american. Sometimes it's hard to decide whose principles the State Department is defending. They certainly aren't those of our Founding Fathers.

About the only anti-property treaty this country hasn't ratified is the odious "Moon Treaty", written by our own State Department. If not for an alert group of citizens (L5 Society), the United States would have ratified this treaty under President Carter and embraced control of all the rest of creation by a World Government. Under "the common heritage of all mankind" space would be the heritage of no one. The vast wealth of resources and energy in our solar system would remain untapped instead of being explored by entrepreneurs who would improve the condition of all humanity. It's time this sick treaty is repudiated once and for all.

We must also demand a revision or understanding to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty so individual property rights are recognized. If there are no implimenting protocols for property rights within a specified time limit we should withdraw from the treaty entirely. In any case, we should immediately open a land office and accept claims of Americans to specific pieces of land, subject to occupancy within 15 years.

Back in the late 1950's a project called Orion seriously considered using small nuclear explosions to power a spacecraft. The lifting capacity would have been vast, measured in thousands of tons instead of the miniscule abilities of today's mightiest rockets. This brute-force approach was simple enough to be considered feasible 30 years ago. Unfortuneately, the idea was shelved by the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

If we truly wish to see the opening of the space frontier, we must not prevent businesses from working on futuristic ideas like fusion drives or matter-antimatter engines. Such technologies will one day open the solar system to commerce the way the clipper ship opened the oceans in the 19th century.

A time may also come when industrial nuclear explosives are needed in deep space for extraction of the vast wealth of resources inside comets and asteroids. Modification of the 1963 Test Ban Treaty and other understandings to clearly allow such non-military use of nuclear technology is in the best interests of all space-faring peoples.

But perhaps most basic of all, we should question why governments of 20th century Earth assume they have the right to make laws for unknown environments, at distances of millions of miles and a time decades or centuries in the future. If the arm of government can reach that far, freedom on Earth is precarious at best.