Space Exploration: Private Sector Investment vs Public Sector Investment

Thanks for the quick reply jjx. ==My "lack of a case"== My opponent claims I "lack a case" and therefore lose. What he doesn't realize is that I gave my case for private sector investment during my rebuttal to his case, or in debate lingo: "I turned the sh!t out of his case." Here are the reasons I enumerated (in the previous round) to prefer private investment: 1) Today, expertise flows FROM the private sector TO NASA, not the other way around. The Augustine Commission told NASA to abandon its own plans and instead model its next-gen spacecraft on Boeing's Delta IV rocket. 2) The public sector is less safe and less accountable. NASA blew up two crews of astronauts recently and couldn't even be sued. The Russian spacecraft blew up a few months ago with no discernable explanation. In contrast, SpaceX completed a successful space flight to the International Space Station. 3) From 2: since the cancellation of NASA's shuttle-replacement program and the "indefinite downing" of Russia's space program, SpaceX, a private company, has the ONLY human spaceflight capability on Earth. 4) NASA has no new money; the private sector does. The House Budgetary Commission has slammed NASA time and time again and has frozen their "space exploration" budget. If we want new money and new jobs, we need to look to the private sector. 5) NASA spends on useless cr@p. Around one fourth of their budget goes to bureaucracy. That's why their return on investment is 10:1 compared to 23:1 in the private sector. A dollar spent in the private sector goes 2.3 times as far. 6) Opportunity cost. We have better things to spend public monies on. 7) NASA takes twice as long and twice as much money to accomplish the same things as the private sector (see the Falcon 9 study). 8) NASA spends jack on the private sector. The private sector can mobilize $10 billion a year for space, whereas NASA spends around $40 million a year on commercial space ventures. 9) When the government apportions money, it does so wastefully, often due to emphasizing lobbying considerations over smart investing (see Solyndra). If you had $10 million, would you rather invest it yourself (private investment) or give it to the government to invest? All 9 of these are reasons to prefer private investment. ==Rebuttal== R1) Military technology My opponent still maintains that NASA is critical to developing defense technologies. He cites two sources in this round. The first merely lists a bunch of NASA discoveries from the 60's; it DOES NOT explain how these apply to the military. The second source mentions NASA only ONCE and says that NASA benefited from military research into spy satellite technology, NOT the other way around. Better spy satellite technology from the Air Force helped NASA develop better monitoring equipment to watch the Earth. This proves MY point, which is unrefuted, that today the Air Force does its own research into spy satellites and ultra-fast space jets. It does not need NASA R&D. In fact, NASA has no money for new projects. I challenge my opponent to name a new area of NASA R&D spending that would somehow be beneficial to defense. My opponent still argues "NASA would be eliminated." This doesn't make sense. He never answers my argument that if you are asked "do you prefer apples or oranges," if you pick oranges, you are not forced to defend a world where apples cease to exist. I don't necessarily have to defend that NASA disappears. But even if it did, NASA does NOT have ANY defense contracts. I linked my opponent to NASA's budget last round. He must show me where in their budget the defense contracts are. Lastly, my opponent asserts its not treason for a U.S. defense contractor to divulge US military secrets to another nation. Yes it is. Being a "private individual" does not exempt you from treason charges. If it were not treason, private defense contractors would sell U.S. secrets all the time to make more money. But they don't. For example, part of Lockheed Martin's deal with the government is that they can make the F-35 next-gen fighter for us, but they cannot divulge the designs or even SELL the F-35 to any other country without U.S. government permission. [1] R2) Safety My opponent still maintains that private companies are unsafe, even though they can get sued but the government cannot. The profit motive creates INCENTIVES for safety. You can't exactly turn a profit if your product routinely kills your customers. My opponent provided a quote saying "an OVEREMPHASIS" on profits is bad. Companies that overemphasize profits, to the exclusions of all else, stifle creativity. You'll never see Google pressure its employees to eke out more profits. Few private companies that are dependent on innovation OVERemphasize profits. They emphasize them a normal amount. My opponent never provides evidence that space companies overemphasize profits to such an extent that it forces them to cut corners. My opponent brings up BP, which is ironically evidence of government subsidies pushing drilling companies into unsafely deep water. 70% of the rent on Deepwater Horizon was subsidized. Without U.S. government subsidy, BP could not have afforded to drill that far out. In addition, this is also a massive government failure, considering that the regulatory agency that inspected Deepwater Horizon (the MMS) rated the rig as "perfectly safe" in spite of multiple safety violations that ultimately led to the explosion. This was due to regulatory capture of the MMS, i.e. bribes and lobbying. This is hardly a model of responsible government. And isn't that what my opponent was arguing for? Also, it's telling that my opponent cannot find an example of corner-cutting in the space industry. My opponent doesn't respond to the multiple US crashes or the recent Russian crash, nor does he respond to the recent successful SpaceX flight. R3) Jobs My opponent claims to offer evidence here that we'd lose 1 million jobs if we privatized NASA. He never provides the actual sources for this. Also, this makes no sense. NASA employs only 18,000 people. [2] Also, if we spent $18 billion more on education, we could easily hire MORE than 18,000 people. For the price of NASA's budget, we could hire 18,000 teachers and pay them each ONE MILLION DOLLARS per year. NASA is hardly prioritizing jobs in the way it spends. Remember how I already showed how 25% of its budget goes to bureaucracy and another 50% goes to maintaining old equipment? My opponent also claims private companies would outsource engineering jobs. However, not all engineering jobs are the same. We can easily outsource computer engineering. But a recent article in Time Magazine pointed out that some of our largest employment gains this year came from aerospace engineering in the private sector (mostly commercial jets). Apparently the US has the best aerospace engineers, so companies don't outsource those jobs. Also, we need NEW jobs, not old jobs, to get rid of our 9% unemployment rate. If NASA has no NEW money to spend, it's not exactly hiring NEW people. Only the private sector has new capital to spend. You want jobs, vote for the private sector. My opponent never contests that the private sector mobilizes $10 billion a year in the space industry. R4) Funding My opponent cites two sources to show that 99 percent of private sector funding comes from NASA. However, he doesn't REALLY say what his sources are. Can I get an author's name, publication date, article title, url, etc? I provided evidence from NASA's own budget that NASA only spends $39 million a year on private space ventures, whereas private sector investment in space numbers at least $10 billion a year. My opponent never really explains how the $1.9 billion Falcon 9 program "couldn't survive" without NASA's paltry million dollar contributions. [1] Christopher Preble, The Power Problem [2] http://www.nasa.gov...