Education and commercial spaceflight figured prominently in a speech given by NASA Administrator (and former Shuttle astronaut) General Charles Bolden to the National Association of Investment Companies on October 20.
It appears Bolden is a big fan of private human spaceflight.
This is a refreshing change. Just five years ago, the President’s Commission on Moon, Mars, and Beyond (the “Aldridge Commission”) declared that human spaceflight would “remain the province of government” for the foreseeable future.
Incredibly, the Aldridge Commission issued that report just days after Mike Melvill earned the first FAA commercial astronaut wings (and made the front page of every newspaper in the world) by piloting SpaceShip One — a classic of beltway insiders being out-of-touch with what’s going on in the rest of the country.
Bolden’s predecessor, Mike Griffin, once told a graduate student it was “not NASA’s job” to help America excel in STEM education.
It appears that General Bolden sees things differently. Here are some excerpts from his speech:
The law that created NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, as amended, gives NASA an often overlooked mission. NASA’s founding legislation states that we will “seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space.”
Whatever the President’s decision [about NASA's future direction], America needs NASA and private industry to work to achieve our national goals in space. This means that NASA must determine efficient and effective ways to leverage the power, and innovation of American industry and the American entrepreneur.
NASA has many tools for this. We can buy more needed products and services in a commercial manner. In the 1920s, the U.S. Post Office became a major customer for airmail, which created the demand that justified the private investment in many airlines.
NASA is doing something similar right now. We are engaged in a new program — the Commercial Reusable Suborbital Research program — that will buy space transportation services from the emerging reusable spaceflight companies to conduct science research, technology development, with a keen focus on education….
As the NASA Administrator one of my greatest challenges — the job I was given by the President — is to lead our NASA team in inspiring the next generation of Americans to once again seek become interested in math, science, engineering, and technology so that our nation can maintain its technological leadership in the world.
For over two decades, I have been speaking to children at schools around America. When I first started, in 1980when I would ask kids if they wanted to be astronauts, nearly every hand would go up. Kids were inspired by astronauts. But in recent years that has changed. Today, in comparison, I have noticed that fewer hands go up.
This problem is not in our youngest. I still get a highly positive reaction from kindergarteners, first and second graders. But somewhere after that time we lose them. Studies show that by the time they have reached high-school, kids have made up their minds about whether they are going to pursue a career in math, science or engineering. Study after study shows we are losing them in the middle grade school years – sometimes as early as third grade for young black boys.
Why is this?
Many kids today are more excited, more motivated, to become a basketball or football star, than they are motivated to be an astronaut, even though the odds are similar. Others are deciding they want to be the next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos rather than pursue a career in science or engineering. They are deciding they want to get rich by making the next new thing.
I am here today to suggest that we can change this dynamic — not by fighting against it, but by working with it.
I am convinced that within almost everybody —our high-school students, our 7th graders, and yes the 30, 40, and 50 somethings - in this audience — lives that kindergartener who still wants to go to space.
What if you did not have to choose between getting rich, doing good, and going to space? What if you could do all three at the same time? Who here in this room would make that choice?
What if you were a seventh grader and you knew that if you buckled down, and studied hard at math and science, that you could go to space? Not because you would be the one of the very few who might become a NASA astronaut, as I was so privileged, but because you saw hundreds of people of all nations traveling into space each and every year, and knew in your bones that you could soon be one of them?
What if you were a college student, and you knew that you could build real hardware in a semester engineering class, and that before the end of the semester your experiment would fly in space, and that you would get the results back from space before you got your grades?
This day could come soon.
The complete text of General Bolden’s speech is available at this link: http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/395165main_Bolden_NAIC_Speech.pdf
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