CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush is all for visionary space projects, and if he ever forgets how important space exploration is to the United States, he’ll hear about it from his little brother.
That was the word Friday from Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who rocketed into Kennedy Space Center with Lt. Gov. Frank Brogan to launch a high-level "Space Summit" aimed at charting the state’s orbital course in the 21st century.
"My brother is a strong supporter of forward-looking space policy, and I think growing up in Houston, Texas -- the location of NASA’s Johnson Space Center -- it’s kind of hard not to be," the younger Bush brother told space.com.
"Lt. Gov. Brogan talked about how we were children of the initial advocacy of space, and how exciting it was to see people with a shared vision focused on big ideas and then implementing them. I know my brother shares that same vision for space," Bush said.
"Now if he doesn’t, and if he’s elected president, I’m the governor of a state that directly benefits from active involvement in space investments, so I will remind him regularly how important it really is for the long-term future of our country."
Home to NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) and Cape Canaveral Air Station, the state of Florida once had a stranglehold not only on most U.S. civil and military space launches but also nearly 100 percent of the market to loft commercial communications satellites.
But over the past two decades, the state has seen its share of the commercial market dwindle significantly as competing spaceports and foreign launch businesses spawned around the world.
Unprecedented in nature, the Space Summit brought Florida aerospace industry and legislative leaders to KSC to develop a strategic plan to protect the state’s interests in the launch market and regain business lost to overseas and other domestic competitors.
"U.S. space policy should not be protectionist, but it should recognize that to allow for the commercial space launch business to go overseas, we do it at our peril," Bush said.
"Other states are totally focused [on the launch business] as well. Virginia and California and other states have very active efforts to try to recruit business to their states. So we’re the leader, but we should never believe success is final."
Florida does enjoy a virtual lock on NASA’s cornerstone project for the early 21st century: Launching all U.S. components of the agency’s $60 billion International Space Station. And down the road, NASA hopes to launch human expeditions back to the moon or on to Mars from the agency’s coastal Florida spaceport.
The Bush brother’s father – former president George Bush – sounded a national charge in the late 1980s to send humans back to the moon – "and this time, back to stay" – on the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1989.
The elder Bush also called for the nation to plant the American flag on Mars by 2019, but his proposal – which at the time carried an astronomical price tag of some $500 billion – was pronounced dead on arrival in Congress.
Florida’s governor said he is uncertain whether his brother would advocate human expeditions beyond Earth orbit if elected president this November. But it apparently would not be out of the question.
"I’ve not heard him speak specifically about any projects. But I think to have a goal that is over the horizon – what we call a B-HAG, or a Big Hairy Audacious Goal – is a good thing for our country," Bush told space.com.
"We live in a world where the great challenges don’t exist. We’re not challenged to dream big dreams and then go pursue them," he said. "Space has always offered that for our country, and it’s an important thing for a country as great as ours to have."
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