Final frontier for private enterprise.(The Last Word)

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, ...