Robert G. Oler

This said, a real dose of common sense needs to be applied here too, and far too much was declared a munition subject to ITAR regulations that was simply borderline insane. This was particularly true when it applied to concepts created strictly by civilians for non-military purposes that only tangentially could be applied as a weapon of war.

I suppose that the Falcon 9 could in theory be turned into an ICBM if somehow Iran or North Korea got ahold of the vehicle including training on how to use it and to modify the technology. Still, it would be a rather lousy ICBM and not really do the job very effectively. How is it that something developed by a completely private company on their own dime can suddenly become “classified” by the military? That is the real question here, and wondering when something like rocket development ought to be an official state secret and when it should simply be published to the world for all to see.

Even so, a bureaucracy has established itself in firm control over the regulation and movement of these sorts of “munitions”, and it takes an act of God (not Congress…. they are too wimpy to deal with this sort of real reform) to get these sorts of folks to release their grip once it is firmly in place. Bureaus and agencies in the U.S. government never go away except under extreme circumstances. Jerry Pournelle calls this the “Iron Law of Bureaucracies”. I’d have to agree with him. Shy of abolishing ITAR completely and considering it a horrible idea, I don’t think any substantive reform will really happen except a few modest and minor tweaks to the overall policy.

This was, of course, the rule in Constellation, where foreigners weren’t going to be allowed to participate in our lunar space transportation architecture, but were being invited to give us boxes we could transport to the Moon. Their lack of excitement about this was pretty understandable.

The pledge by this administration to make space exploration an international partnership is a good one, and it can’t be done without export control reform.