With End of Shuttle Program, Pentagon Worried about Aerospace Industrial BaseJuly 21, 2011

 

shuttle

With the space shuttle era coming to an end and the Defense Department's budget on the chopping block, a senior Pentagon official said that the government must consider how to protect the aerospace industrial base, according to an article in the National Journal.

At stake, said Gregory Schulte, deputy assistant secretary for defense for space policy, is the United States' technological edge in space. The Pentagon's ambitions in space and NASA's own missions are connected. "While we don't share the shuttle, we do share the industrial base," said Schulte. "And so anything that NASA does is important to us in terms of the industrial base. And anything that we do is important to NASA as well."

As U.S. ambitions in space have diminished in the recent decades, aerospace companies have been asking for a long-term commitment by the U.S. government to launch new programs. And while private and commercial investors have grown more interested in space, they still cannot match the amount of funding possible from the government.

"We're worried about the state of the industrial base," said Schulte. He suggested several ways to protect and nurture a robust and competitive industrial base, according to the Journal. He added that it is vital for the government to stabilize the procurement process by changing acquisition practices with strategies such as relying more on purchasing in large quantities and providing advanced funding, according to the article.

Another suggestion: Reform the export-control system. Allowing companies to sell space technologies already available in commercial markets overseas would allow them to compete better against other foreign companies and broaden markets. "It doesn't make sense that we disallow our commercial companies from marketing technologies that are readily available on the commercial market," said Schulte. To speed up the process to allow exports of key technologies, the government needs to create a single agency to handle these exports and to collect information, he suggested.