WASHINGTON (States News Service) -- Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-California) heads the House Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee, which oversees NASA's budget. Here's his take on the space agency, Congress and his favorite pastime -- surfing.
Q: What do you think is NASA’s greatest achievement?
ROHRABACHER: Everyone’s always tempted to say putting the man on the moon at the time period that they did. I think its greatest achievement was reaching the level of technical expertise that it did that permitted the trip and permitted Skylab (the first U.S. space station). The space shuttle is a monumental engineering achievement although we know that there are flaws with the shuttle and flaws with the moon project. Both were so intensive and so resource consuming that they undermined the space program’s gradual development and solid development along a broad front. Instead [NASA] raced ahead to show it was possible but in the process used so many resources that it hindered other space development. Both of those were very, very costly and did have their pluses and minuses.
Q: What's the biggest hurdle to commercializing space?
ROHRABACHER: We still do not have a transportation system that has brought down the cost of getting into space. Before we get into anything else, we need to dramatically bring down the cost of getting into space. We're only beyond that (pre-1990s) era of large expensive projects because of some people who have tried to insist that we look at things in a mildly responsible way. When I first got involved in the [House Science] Committee, everyone was talking about going to Mars. It was going to be the ultimate grandiose expensive program. That would have eaten up all of the resources we had for developing new launch capabilities and developing methods of that would open up the doors of commercialization and open up the use of space to the benefit of all of humankind. I've been fighting that flash and glitter approach to NASA for the last 10 years. That may well have been one of the greatest things I've been able to accomplish; to help people from thinking about huge, grandiose programs anymore.
Q: What do you think of NASA’s "faster, better, cheaper" philosophy?
ROHRABACHER: We should make sure we learn from every one of our failures. The lessons to be learned are not that we need to spend more money but that we need to take more care and that people need to do their job more effectively. [In the Mars mission failures] there were demonstrable things that were not done and [review boards] could not tie that directly to a lack of personnel. Does it take 50 more staff members in order to figure out that you have to completely test a piece of technology before you put it on the end of a rocket? That's just common sense. Just because there are some failures, as you'll have in any endeavor, we should not turn course and go back to expensive projects that limit the number of approaches we have in space to one or two.
Q: What are your thoughts on NASA Administrator Dan Goldin's eight-year tenure, the longest in the agency’s history?
ROHRABACHER: I’d say the longest and the best. I think Dan Goldin has done a tremendous job. I think Dan Goldin has provided the leadership that NASA needs to provide great things with a limited budget. For that we owe him a great deal of credit. He was appointed during a Republican-controlled Congress and kept on board by a Democratic administration. He’s had to juggle all of these political forces while trying to get the job done. He has been a master juggler and you might say he's done this in zero gravity as well.
Q: Did your years as a journalist influence your job now?
ROHRABACHER: There are a lot of other people who have much greater technical knowledge than I do. As a former journalist that is not something that frightens me or in any way deters me from moving forward. I'm not deterred by people who have more information than I do or greater technical knowledge because I think I have some common sense and I am able to sift through information very quickly and get to the heart of the matter.
Q: Are you still surfing? And how did you get into that anyway?
ROHRABACHER: I really got into surfing after I came back from the White House and was elected to Congress 12 years ago. A surfer girl came up and she heard I knew how to surf and so she enrolled me in a surfing contest to raise money for the surfing museum. My board was too big and cumbersome. She told me the new boards are better. This is where it got me into technology. The fact is technology has impacted space travel the same way it's impacted surfboards. It has allowed people with moderate skills like myself to go out and enjoy it. And so she took me out surfing and I've been surfing every week since then. And two years ago, I married that same girl.
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