“...calls for privatizing the ‘space business’ completely overlook the important history lessons of Apollo during the 1960s era. By outsourcing space exploration and removing it from the halls of government, we also distance it from the public sphere. During the 1960s this was definitely not the case. A damp field at Cape Canaveral, the hallways and elevator bays of the Johnson Space Center, the streets of Manhattan during an astronaut ticker-tape parade, and even a rock concert on a farm in upstate New York, all became town squares, of sorts, where grassroots activists rose up on their soapboxes and spoke out against the space race. Because of such public pronouncements in these public spaces, NASA, a civilian agency funded with taxpayer dollars, was forced to listen and pressured to respond.
Private companies such as SpaceX and Virgin Galactic will be much more hard of hearing when it comes to a clamoring public. Ceding space exploration to such private interests thus jeopardizes our ability to influence federal policy and weakens the government’s constitutional obligation to us, its citizens. Doing so also might make it more difficult to look back and examine our own planet.”
–Neil M. Maher, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017), 237.
