SpaceX Versus Senator Shelby's Rocket to Nowhere

Should Elon Musk and the engineers at Space Exploration Technologies Corp., do more paperwork? Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, thinks so. He has inserted language into a Senate appropriations bill to force private space entrepreneurs such as Musk to navigate the kind of red tape that has transformed NASA into a directionless, sclerotic bureaucracy. Even worse, the provision guarantees to perpetuate U.S. dependence on Russian rockets to deliver Americans into space at a cost of $70 million per astronaut.

As far back as the mid-2000s, NASA began planning for its own "space taxi" to replace the shuttle after its final launch in 2011. Funding issues, congressional meddling, policy differences between the George W. Bush and the Barack Obama administrations, and bureaucratic roadblocks, caused that goal to be missed by years. Nonetheless, there remained reason for hope. In 2010, Congress created the Commercial Crew Development program to promote the development of technology and companies capable of delivering crews to low Earth orbit by 2015 (due to funding concerns, this deadline was extended to 2017).