GOP Congressman Wants To Block Elon Musk From Competing In Space
By Greg Autry — Mr. Autry, an adjunct professor with the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at the Marshall School of Business, USC.
“Paring down the number of competitors will help things along greatly because the funding won’t be split.”
Query: To which Party and State would might you attribute the above market-bashing quote? California Democrat? Independent from Vermont? Surprisingly, this socialist missive comes from the staff of a Conservative Texas Republican.
Supporting the elimination of competition – that notorious creator of delay and inefficiency – from NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, Robert La Branche, senior legislative assistant to Rep. John Culberson (R-TX), uttered these comments to the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee last week. Of course, what Mr. La Branche and his Congressional boss would really like to eliminate is that most inconvenient of competitors, the entrepreneur. And the very worst manifestation of entrepreneurial pestilence is, of course, California’s notorious Elon Musk.
Not content with attacking the sanctity of America’s highly regarded car dealers via direct sales of his annoyingly successful Tesla electric vehicle, Mr. Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies is now threatening to undermine the renowned efficiency of America’s Military-Industrial-Complex. A series of successful lunches SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon cargo capsule have left the traditional vendors looking overpriced and unambitious. Meanwhile, the DragonRider, a manned vehicle based on their proven design, is scheduled for testing of its crew escape system in a few months and could be ready to loft humans into space next year. This competitive approach puts unfair pressure on NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS), a multi-billion dollar state-owned rework of the space shuttle that is many years from flying anywhere. What’s a conservative congressperson to do?
If NASA were compelled to “downselect” Commercial Crew to a single vendor, Washington power politics would clearly favor Boeing’s CST-100 capsule, a luxurious spacecraft, that while it has never flown, is on track for some unmanned flights to the ISS in about three years. This leisurely development schedule puts no pressure on SLS. While it is surely coincidently that both the SLS and CST-100 programs are headquartered in Houston, we are lucky to have Messrs. La Branche and Culberson standing between us and the utter chaos of free market competition.
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http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/05/14/gop-congressman-wants-to-block-elon-musk-from-competing-in-space/
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