America Needs a National Aerospace Plan
A more proactive approach is needed to preserve one of the nation’s industrial crown jewels.
For decades, America’s aerospace industry led the world.
Despite wider national de-industrialization, aerospace remained a source of traditional manufacturing strength and a crown jewel of American industry. Indeed, the industry still directly employs hundreds of thousands of American workers (over 534,000 in 2019, according to U.S. government figures) and, according to industry estimates, hundreds of thousands more indirectly. It’s also a top American exporter, with the second highest level of exports ($148 billion) and the highest trade balance ($77.6 billion) of any U.S. manufacturing industry as of 2019. Perhaps most importantly, however, the American aerospace industry still stands as a highly visible symbol of the nation’s engineering prowess, technological skill, and national ambition.
The American aerospace industry also represents a decades-long bipartisan, cross-ideological policy success story. For over a century now, Democratic and Republican presidential administrations backed policies that, each in their own ways, encouraged an aerospace industry to take root in the United States and thrive in a competitive global marketplace. Though their exact policies differed along with their underlying beliefs, liberals and conservatives alike helped transform a fledgling American aviation industry that often lagged behind its European competitors in the 1910s and 1920s into the global titan that helped take humanity to the Moon and back again.
In recent years, however, the dangers of resting on our collective laurels and ambling ahead with no real vision have become apparent. Boeing’s ongoing 737 MAX debacle and the chronic manufacturing issues with its 787 Dreamliner show just how far the once-proud commercial aviation giant has fallen—and transformed one of America’s leading aerospace companies into what one journalist took as the exemplar for the current “Dark Age of American Manufacturing.”
The industry’s problems aren’t confined to Boeing and its commercial aviation business, either. Lockheed’s challenges with the F-35 stealth fighter are well-known and ongoing, with software problems delaying the delivery of new jets to the U.S. Air Force as well as NATO allies like Denmark and Belgium. Nor has the company announced plans to expand production to meet increased demand, even after the war in Ukraine revealed production capacity shortfalls across the entire American defense industry and as orders for the older F-16 fighter remain backlogged.
In space, the United States has quickly become far too reliant on just one firm—SpaceX—for its launch and space exploration needs; problems with SpaceX’s Starship spacecraft have already delayed NASA’s plans to return astronauts to the surface of the Moon with its Artemis III mission. Worse, NASA’s own famed Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the brains behind many of the agency’s robotic exploration programs, faces “broader institutional issues” that have delayed missions and forced them over budget. The cost of NASA’s ambitious Mars Sample Return mission has also skyrocketed, leading to significant changes to the planned mission.
While America’s aerospace industry has been licking these self-inflicted wounds, rivals and competitors overseas have moved forward with their own air and space projects. China, for instance, aims to land its own astronauts on the Moon by 2030, plans to launch its own Mars sample return mission that same year, and has made a push to sign nations up to its proposed Moon base—what it calls the International Lunar Research Station. Beijing also subsidizes the C919, its own entry into the global commercial airliner market. What’s more, Boeing’s continuing woes have allowed its friendly European competitor, Airbus, to sell more airliners on global markets for the past five years running.
Put simply, if America wants to keep its aerospace industry alive and well in the years and decades to come, it needs a clear and explicit plan to do so moving forward.
Giving America’s aerospace industry a much-needed shot in the arm ought to be a priority for those of us in the nascent new vital center, a policy area where both right and left can cooperate constructively toward a common goal. Methods and policy preferences may differ—those on the liberal side of the new vital center may favor more robust public investment, for instance, while those of a more conservative bent may incline toward tax incentives, commercial contracts, and similar policies. But we ought to be able to agree on the overall goal: a thriving American aerospace industry that can both meet the nation’s manifold needs and compete strongly in the global marketplace.
Historically, America’s aerospace industry has received strong bipartisan support that both transcended and reflected ideological differences. Congress created the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics—the predecessor of today’s NASA—during the Wilson administration, and Wilson’s postmaster general instituted the nation’s first air mail service. Wilson’s conservative Republican successors picked up the baton in the 1920s, signing legislation that put air mail service in the hands of private contractors and helped nurture an embryonic commercial aviation industry. But it would take massive public spending as America prepared for World War II to create the aerospace industry as we know it today. In May 1940, President Franklin D. Roosevelt called on American industry to build at least 50,000 aircraft a year; by the end of the war, the United States had cranked out roughly 300,000 planes.
This bipartisan priority continued during the Cold War. During the Eisenhower administration, the Air Force effectively became the launch customer for Boeing’s 707 jetliner in the guise of the KC-135 tanker. Under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, the United States devoted considerable resources—the equivalent of approximately $280 billion in 2020 dollars over 13 years—to sending American astronauts to the Moon and returning them safely to the Earth. Likewise, President Nixon backed the space shuttle program while former vice president Hubert Humphrey touted his support for the project during his ultimately unsuccessful 1972 campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. But on a close vote, Congress refused (probably wisely) to continue funding an American supersonic transport akin to the Anglo-French Concorde.
America’s aerospace industry retained bipartisan support even as a market-knows-best ethos took hold from the mid-1970s onward, though not at the same scope or scale as before. President Reagan, for instance, directed NASA to build what eventually became the International Space Station, while the commercial cargo program inaugurated under the George W. Bush administration paved the way for the commercial crew program launched under the Obama administration. It’s hard to imagine America’s commercial space industry today—and SpaceX’s dominant role in it—without these two programs.
This recent bipartisan success story aside, for the past four decades America’s aerospace policy has lacked any larger vision or impulse to guide and animate it. It should come as no surprise, then, that the aerospace industry has been buffeted and brought down by the broader shift in America’s political economy away from actually making things and toward financial chicanery. The results have been terrible for one of America’s leading industries—and for America itself.
A healthy aerospace industry remains essential for American security, prosperity, and national ambition. America can’t afford to let this vital industrial goliath slowly waste away—or let it collapse as a result of its own self-inflicted wounds.
Step One: Stop the Bleeding
First things first: public policy needs to focus on helping the aerospace industry right its own ship.
Most urgently, that means rebooting Boeing after its disastrous past decade. Launch aid from the U.S. government for a new narrow-body jetliner to replace the 737 family should definitely be under consideration—if only to prevent Boeing from entering a death spiral that would make it impossible for the company to design any new commercial aircraft. Any such aid should come with certain non-negotiable strings attached, in particular requirements to clean Boeing’s corporate house and remove executives and leaders so obsessed with share prices that they forgot their company’s entire raison d'être.
Whatever the specifics, though, the goal of these conditions should be re-establish building safe and reliable airplanes as Boeing’s primary vocation—not pumping up stock prices by any means necessary. A culture devoted to engineering excellence can’t be resurrected overnight, and the hard work needs to begin now. Listening to the company’s unions can and should be an important first step here; allowing unionization drives in non-union Boeing plants could be another. It may also require hardball from the government to compel Boeing’s cooperation: during the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, corporate leaders refused $17 billion in economic assistance because it might have given the public an equity stake in the company.
But Boeing is too important to American security and prosperity to fail, and responsible political leaders need to step in and make sure it doesn’t—whether the financial wizards who have run the company into the ground like it or not.
Next, the United States needs to end its reliance on just one company—SpaceX—to send astronauts, satellites, and spacecraft into orbit. With 98 launches in 2023, SpaceX accounted for nearly 90 percent of all American space launch attempts that year. This de facto launch monopoly is likely a temporary artifact of a series of policy decisions and technical delays faced by other aerospace companies. Following Russia’s first invasion of Ukraine in 2014, for instance, Congress banned the use of the RD-180 rocket engine that powered the United Launch Alliance’s workhorse Atlas V booster—forcing ULA to develop an entirely new rocket, the Vulcan, that first launched just this past January.
America’s dependence on SpaceX to reach orbit and work in space will likely end in the coming months and years. Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is currently scheduled for its first launch this September, and after years of delays Boeing’s Starliner crew vehicle will likely make its first crewed test flight to the International Space Station no earlier than May 17. Blue Origin also received a NASA contract to build a second lunar lander for the Artemis Program; SpaceX’s ongoing difficulties making its Starship vehicle work—and the nearly 20 launches of that vehicle needed to take astronauts down to the lunar surface on Artemis III—make Blue Origin’s contract something of a necessary insurance policy against further SpaceX delays.
Still, it ought to remain a priority to see that America has more than one option to choose from when it comes to launches and spaceflight—especially when that lone option remains under the leadership of a mercurial, social media-addled billionaire.
Finally, NASA and JPL need to get the Mars Sample Return mission back on track—and Congress needs to provide the funds needed to do so. Bringing samples of Martian soil back to Earth will represent an impressive feat of science and engineering in and of itself, one well worth the between $8 billion and $11 billion investment now required. As the Independent Review Board charged with scrutinizing the mission’s plans observed, the Mars Sample Return mission should be “a priority for the nation that historically has dared to do the seeming impossible in space.”
More broadly, NASA’s robotic exploration programs need better funding from Congress. Inadequate staffing at JPL delayed the launch of the Psyche mission, for instance, which in turn pushed the launch of the VERITAS mission to Venus back three years. While frustration with cost overruns is understandable and often warranted, starving America’s robotic exploration enterprise of necessary resources will only deprive the United States of an irreplaceable source of national pride and international prestige. Money can’t solve everything, but injecting an additional $1 billion for robotic exploration into NASA’s budget would help kickstart matters and get the program back on track.
Step Two: A Flight Plan for the Long Haul
As things stand now, America’s approach to aerospace is fragmented—and the whole somehow manages to add up to less than the sum of its parts. The Biden administration’s National Space Council has published a “Space Priorities Framework,” for instance, and a number of other bureaucratic strategy and framework documents to help guide its space policy. These documents can be useful in coordinating the efforts of relevant government agencies as they embark on more specific tasks, but in general they do not set actual priorities. Instead, they tend to enumerate overall principles and identify areas of policy interest more than anything else.
Various individual agencies like NASA, along with their constituent components and divisions, put forward their own strategies as well. The Federal Aviation Administration, for instance, published its own five-year strategic plan in 2021, while NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate outlined where it would focus its own efforts in its 2023 Strategic Implementation Plan. Similarly, the National Academies of Sciences works with relevant scientists and research institutions to pull together the decadal surveys that guide NASA’s science endeavors—including its robotic exploration program. But America has no real, overarching plan to ensure that its aerospace industry remains the world’s finest, more than able to push the frontiers of technology and engineering forward to meet the extensive military, commercial, and civil demands the nation places upon it.
So what would a national aerospace strategy look like in practice?
First and foremost, it would look as aerospace as an organic and interconnected whole—not a fragmented and siloed into different areas and agencies. Any aerospace strategy worthy of the name would reflect this reality.
One agency or organization should play a central role in bringing this strategy together. The National Space Council could expand its remit to include aviation as well as space, for instance, becoming the National Air and Space Council or the National Aerospace Council. As its name suggests, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration would be an excellent candidate as well. NASA already possesses working relationships, many of them strong and long-standing, with other government agencies like the Department of Defense and FAA as well as with the aerospace industry—NASA is working closely with both Boeing and Lockheed to build its two newest experimental test aircraft, for instance. Labor should have a seat at the table along with management to ensure that aerospace companies and government agencies alike remain focused on their top priority: ensuring the industry can actually make the airplanes and spacecraft the nation needs.
When it comes to substance, a national aerospace strategy should have two main goals: setting national priorities in aerospace in four select areas of focus—space exploration, commercial aviation, civil and commercial uses of space, and defense—and monitoring the overall health of the aerospace industry itself to confirm that it remains can make airplanes, helicopters, rockets, and spacecraft that work reliably and at reasonable cost.
Some examples can give a sense of what priorities within each area of focus might look like. In space exploration, for instance, Artemis and the robotic exploration program endorsed by the most recent decadal survey could be top priorities. Likewise, guaranteeing American companies produce safe and reliable aircraft ought to be commercial aviation’s top priority, alongside research and development work on ultra-efficient airliners and quiet supersonic transport. Maintaining a reliable fleet of up-to-date Earth observation and Global Positioning System satellites as well as establishing clear rules of the road for America’s budding commercial space industry could be priorities for the civil and commercial space pillar. On defense, it should be a priority to make certain America’s aerospace industry can build the hardware the U.S. military and American allies require both on time and at acceptable cost; this priority would fit neatly with the Defense Department’s recent emphasis on shoring up what’s now called the defense industrial base.
It's one thing to come up with a plan of action, though, and another entirely to successfully execute it. A national aerospace strategy ought to have political support across party and ideological lines—indeed, a bipartisan group of House members recently called for an increase in NASA’s science budget—though of course there will be differences in emphasis when it comes to the articulation and execution of policy. Those on the right of the new vital center will undoubtedly favor a more commercial-oriented approach along the lines of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program and Commercial Resupply Services initiatives along with defense spending, while those of us on the left wing of the new vital center will likely favor more vigorous and direct public investment in ambitious projects like Artemis and robotic exploration.
In reality, we’re likely to get a national aerospace policy that combines both approaches to varying degrees, as has historically been the case. No matter the details, any such policy will require additional money—but not necessarily exorbitant sums. NASA will probably need a bit more funding for Artemis (in particular, the program’s complicated lunar landers) as well as robotic exploration, for instance, to keep both campaigns on track, while launch aid for a new Boeing narrow-body jetliner could run into the tens of billions of dollars and may potentially lead to ugly spats with the company’s current leadership over needed changes to its broken corporate culture.
Congress would be wise to make these down payments—and in the context of a multi-trillion dollar annual federal budget, they’re relatively modest sums. It’s a small price to pay to keep America’s aerospace industry alive and well in the years and decades to come.
America’s aerospace industry represents an industrial policy success story spanning parties, ideologies, and generations. But it’s an industry that’s faltered dramatically in recent years, thanks in no small part to a distorted national political economy that’s privileged financial wizardry above all else. Despite its recent woes, however, America’s aerospace industry remains a national crown jewel—both a symbol and engine of American power, prowess, and ambition that must be preserved and maintained.
A new national aerospace strategy ought to serve as a place where both the left and the right wings of a new vital center can come together on an important domestic policy issue, one with enormous foreign policy and national security ramifications. If there’s one thing both wings of a new vital center should be able to agree on, it’s that America needs to keep its aerospace industry alive, viable, and world-class—both now and in the future.
"Still, it ought to remain a priority to see that America has more than one option to choose from when it comes to launches and spaceflight—especially when that lone option remains under the leadership of a mercurial, social media-addled billionaire."
Mr. Juul just can't help himself....