The Strongest Horse Is A Wild Stallion

05/29/03 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

Glenn Reynods of Instapundit writes about space in his Tech Central Station column called The Stronger Horse. In the column he laments the lack of big government space projects over the past few years as he throws out all of his old space advocacy junk from his blue pill days. One item is a “poster of Ron Jones' roadmap to space settlement” which, disappointingly has never been realized. The main reason it hasn't is that, while I haven't seen the poster, I'm willing to bet it had nothing on it about building products for markets that would pay for the effort.

He does spend one paragraph talking about the good news from folks like LunaCorp (no mention of TransOrbital?), Rutan, and Bezos (no mention of Carmack). But he seems almost shocked that the real work is getting done in the commercial realm:

bq.

Old-fashioned science fiction stories from the 1940s and early 1950s - Robert Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo is a good example - saw commercial space activity taking place in low earth orbit before anyone bothered to go to the moon. This seemed silly when I read it as a kid in the 1970s. But it may be an accurate view of how things will go if the main drivers are commercial, rather than governmental.

To me it seems equally silly that anyone would expect government programs were going to build our space faring civilization when its been private enterprise that created them in the past. Sure, Columbus had the backing of a queen but that was because she thought she could make money off the trade routes, not because it would increase re-election prospects.

He even goes on to grab at small straws by arguing that a space faring civilization will be saved due to the space arms race between India and China or by the US dominating space so as to intimidate Osama bin Laden (like Osama even cares). Why is Glenn so disappointed that the government isn't doing the massive space projects he so longed for when the likes of XCOR, Armadillo and Bigelow will probably get around to it long before the governments procurement process could even figure out how much paper to buy to print the bid.

Come on Glenn, take the red pill…