Final frontier for private enterprise.

If the excitement over NASA's Spirit rover on Mars is any indication, many Americans seem to accept that federal taxpayer dollars and government oversight are indispensable to scientific progress. But once upon a time, America's most successful inventors and scientists conducted research using their own funds or with the help of grants from private donors. Benjamin Franklin's pathbreaking work on electricity, Alexander Graham Bell's telephone, Thomas Edison's numerous inventions, and the Wright brothers' airplanes are all examples of private enterprise fueling scientific and technological advancement.

Modern space travel, in fact, owes its existence to the talents of Robert H. Goddard, the original "rocket scientist" and another brilliant product of American private enterprise. Goddard began experimenting with rocketry while a student at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and by 1914 had earned U.S. patents both for liquid rocket fuel and for a multi-stage rocket using solid fuel. Working primarily at his own expense and with the help of several grants from private institutions, Goddard over the next several decades literally invented modern rocket science. He was the first to develop and successfully launch a liquid fuel rocket, in March of 1926. Three years later, he became the first to launch a rocket with a scientific payload (a barometer and camera). In 1932, Goddard developed a gyroscopic control apparatus for rocket flight and first used vanes situated in the rocket blast for guidance. In 1937, Goddard launched for the first time a rocket with a motor pivoted on gimbals and under the influence of a gyroscopic control system.

It was only with the outbreak of World War II that the federal government finally recognized Goddard's talents. He offered his services to the U.S. Navy and successfully developed jet-assisted takeoff systems and rocket motors capable of variable thrust. He died in August 1945, just before the end of the war.

Robert Goddard's work for the federal government late in life underscores an important point: Washington's interest in science and exploration is and always will be mostly military. Scientific research and development for military ends are, after all, constitutionally legitimate, whatever their budgetary expediency. But the federal government is not constitutionally authorized to use taxpayer dollars to promote science for its own sake. In general, the feds have a poor track record in the domain of pure scientific research, wasting extravagant sums on boondoggles like the Superconducting Supercollider and the Hubble Space telescope (which, it will be recalled, suffered from a flawed lens and required an expensive manned space mission, years after the original launch, to repair it).

Because space has been militarized to a certain extent, further research and development into space-based military systems seems inevitable. But trips to the moon, Mars and elsewhere in the solar system have no foreseeable military application. The primary purpose of such programs is to furnish a regimentary national "sense of purpose" while squandering taxpayer monies. As President Kennedy famously put it, in a speech at Rice University in September 1962, "we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do ... other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills." President Bush, in his recent announcement of an ambitious new program to resume missions to the moon and to prepare for an eventual manned mission to Mars, indicated that "we choose to explore space because doing so improves our lives, and lifts our national spirit."

The unspoken premise of statements like these is that only through strong, centralized political leadership and the use of federal taxpayer dollars can significant progress be made. Omitted is any acknowledgement that, if permitted, private enterprise might achieve comparable advances in space exploration with greater efficiency and at no cost to the taxpaying public.

While it is true that some government science projects, such as satellite development, have yielded unlooked-for bonanzas to the private sector, much of the space program has been a colossal waste of public funds because, compared with private enterprise, few incentives exist in the public sector for thrift, careful planning, ingenuity and sound decision-making. What is the value of admittedly mind-blowing photographs of distant nebulae and galaxy clusters when weighed against the literally astronomical sums of money spent on maintaining a leaky space station, an antiquated and unreliable shuttle fleet, and a never-ending stream of hit-or-miss space probes?

The romantic in all of us enjoys contemplating the limitless marvels of creation revealed in high-resolution photos of alien worlds and distant star systems. There can be little doubt that modern science is one of the triumphs of Western Civilization. But science itself, as the achievements of Robert Goddard and many other American scientific pioneers bear witness, is best carried out in the private sector, where the limitations of ever-fickle fiscal polities and dubious constitutionality are no hindrance to human creativity.