BY ROBERT WALKER AND CHARLES MILLER
Reprinted from the Wall Street Journal

During his first term, President Obama set out to transform NASA’s relationship with the private sector, announcing a plan in February 2010 to make technology, innovation and commercial space travel and exploration the centerpiece of his administration’s space strategy. Despite great resistance from special interests, the president proposed to cancel NASA’s programs to build government-designed rockets, leaving that to the private sector.

Unfortunately, Congress wouldn’t go along. Now that Mr. Obama has started a second term, however, he is well positioned to recommit himself to a vision that in the long run will benefit every American and may be remembered as a 30-year arc of Reagan-Bush-Obama space policy.

The effort to build a partnership between the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and American free enterprise actually began on July 4, 1982, when Ronald Reagan announced a new national policy of supporting private space travel and exploration. Reagan created the Office of Commercial Space Transportation to streamline regulation on commercial launch vehicles. He persuaded a Democratic-led Congress to expand NASA’s official legal mission to “seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space,” and he freed commercial satellites from a requirement that they be carried aloft on the government-owned-and-operated Space Shuttle.

Following Reagan’s lead, in 2004 President George W. Bush created the Commercial-Crew and Cargo program, which directed NASA to use commercial services to ferry crew and cargo to the International Space Station. Mr. Bush’s national commission, convened under former Air Force Secretary Edwin Aldridge, found that “NASA’s relationship to the private sector, its organizational structure, business culture, and management processes—all largely inherited from the Apollo era—must be decisively transformed.”

In 2008 during the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama took up this theme when he said that “We must unleash the genius of private enterprise to secure the United States’ leadership in space.” In 2010, he decided to cancel the government-designed Ares 1 and Ares V rockets.

Congress, and considerations about constituents in affected states such as Florida and Alabama, later stopped Mr. Obama’s plan to cancel the government’s super-heavy-lift rocket, which was known as Ares V and then recreated as the Space Launch System. But the president had showed boldness in trusting America’s future to commercial companies.

The U.S. private space industry has now succeeded beyond the imagination of most politicians. In 2010, others were predicting that NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services program—which was designed to encourage the use of private delivery vehicles—would fail. They were wrong. Private industry delivered cargo to the International Space Station twice in 2012 and even returned cargo to Earth from the ISS. Today commercial vehicles carry aloft everything from robotic space craft to satellites and national-security payloads for the Department of Defense

President Obama should now complete the privatization of all U.S. space transportation. Just as the government does not design or build automobiles, ships, trains or airplanes, NASA should not be designing, building or launching rockets to go to low Earth orbit.

NASA, in fact, has not successfully developed a new rocket in over three decades. U.S. private industry successfully developed three brand-new rockets in just the past decade—Boeing BA +1.06% with the Delta IV, Lockheed with the Atlas V, and SpaceX with the Falcon 9. Industry succeeded because of a partnership with the government, much like the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century. Industry was responsible for development and was taking large risks, but with government incentives.

The full privatization of U.S. space transportation will bring two immediate benefits. First, America can and will recapture global leadership in commercial space transportation (we are currently fourth in launches per year, behind Russia, Europe and Ukraine), bringing thousands of good jobs back to America. Second, since NASA will be purchasing services—essentially tickets for crew and cargo—on the same commercial transportation used by the Defense Department, the department will save money, which can be used to improve U.S. national security.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of this transition will be NASA. Private industry can build the rockets, and do a much better job at lowering costs than any government agency. NASA can then focus on the important and difficult jobs that only NASA can do Among other things, this would include developing gamechanging technologies such as advanced electric propulsion that are still too risky for any company to invest in, and which will create brand-new industries in the 21st century.

A renewed and refocused NASA is critical to America’s future. So as the country struggles with trillions in debt and deficits, it makes no sense for NASA to build rockets that are already available or can be developed at much lower cost by U.S. private industry. Why spend approximately $20 billion to build an unneeded SLS super-heavy-lift rocket, for instance, when existing commercial rockets can carry payloads more often, efficiently and cheaply?

Thinking in innovative and nontraditional ways can save the American taxpayer tens of billions of dollars as the space frontier is opened to a new era of exploration and development and human settlement. The president would do well to renew his fight to unleash the genius of private enterprise.

Editors Note: Mr. Walker is a former chairman of the House Science and Technology Committee and now is chairman of Wexler & Walker. Mr. Miller is a former NASA senior adviser for commercial space and president of NexGen Space LLC, a space policy consulting firm.

A version of this article appeared January 28, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Commercial Space Exploration Needs an Obama Relaunch