I Know This Makes People Nervous, But...
The Time for the Privatization of Space Exploration Was a Long Time Ago. I'm Glad it's Finally Here
I was talking to my old boss recently. Eric is a good dude. He helps people and offers advice where he can whether for work or not. Eric is great people by any measure I am aware of. He said something that struck me oddly though. And it’s not that he’s wrong. I actually agree that the problem is, more or less, what he said it was. My problem stems from the proposals I’ve heard from others about how to change things. Eric seems to think that Elon Mush is a bad guy and that SpaceX is a bad
See, what I hear people saying is that space shouldn’t be controlled by rich people. That only governments should be allowed to pursue things in space. That some things are too important to be left to business. I will not, I cannot, ever agree to anything along those lines. It is government that can’t be trusted.
Understand this, folks: I consider government, on its best and most fruitful day, to be a necessary evil. Companies have done some bad things in the past. I get it. I’m not a fan of excessive regulation, but a little has to happen. We need to keep rat feces out of food. The breaks in your car need to function properly. Fraud is a problem. Contracts have to be enforced. I get all of that. Government is, unfortunately, the only thing capable of defending the public from itself.
Government is also, in a lot of ways, just a bigger version of the Mafia. Seriously. La Cosa Nostra has the protection racket, right. Either you give them a cut of your earnings or they will destroy your business. If you don’t pay they’ll shut you down. The government taxes businesses. If they businesses don’t pay the government sends in the IRS to take everything and shut the business down. The government claims that they have legitimacy based on a mandate from the people, but do they? The Mafia has gambling rackets. The government has the lottery. The list goes on.
Here’s the thing though. The government can regulate business. Like it or not, the government does regulate business. Who regulates the government? The people? Right. The government decides what laws exist and which apply to it as an entity. Government over most of the world has regulated the people’s ownership of the means to resist and is attempting to do the same here in the US. That’s not likely to change any time soon.
Having admitted all of that, and despite being an enormous fan of Musk and SpaceX, I have to admit that a monopoly is not a good thing, either. Letting one man, and SpaceX is a sole proprietorship under Musk, control spaceflight is not a good thing. Musk seems to not be too much of a control freak at this point, but that could change. I still don’t see government as the answer.
The answer, as in most things, is competition. Space Impulse has a list of potential problem solvers right here, for the most part. Their list of the top six space companies leads off with SpaceX at number one. SpaceX has earned the number one slot. There are five more companies on that list.
If this is the first time you’ve heard someone state that “Competition is good for the market” then please allow me to invite you to do some more reading after you have completed reading this article. It’s a time honored adage because it’s true. What we need is not bigger government (and I found out while writing this that many in Europe agree with me. Look for my take on that tomorrow.) but more companies.
Folks, we’re going to need space soon. Earth has a lot of resources but they won’t last forever. Musk is right when he says that humanity could be wiped out with a single asteroid as long as we’re only on one planet. Over population doesn’t seem to be the problem we all thought it would be as we’re trending toward a shrinkage in the amount of people in existence in the not-so-distant future, but that could turn around and then we’ll need someplace to put people.
At the dawn of the Twentieth Century there were hardly any cars in existence. At the dawn of the Twenty First Century, cars were everywhere. Freight can be shipped from one end of a continent to another by truck. Busses carry millions of people to work every day. All of that came not because government built industry, but because businesses found a way to make car production profitable. (And yes, government built roads. Not, however, until the proliferation of cars made them necessary and the public demanded them and even then they took the money from the businesses that built the cars and the people who drove them.)
The last major government victory in spaceflight was in 1969. Apollo 11 pushed the limits of human technology and innovation. On May 11 of that year, Neil Armstrong stepped foot on the moon and space truly became the final frontier. We’ve made no outward progress since then, at least in terms of human exploration. Probes are fine and learning is good but nothing replaces boots on the ground.
Elon wants to send us to Mars to stay. Maybe he’ll succeed. Maybe he won’t. I’m a historian, not a prophet. At least he has the balls to try. Elon has stated that he will bring the price of sending something to orbit down to the price of airmailing an object of the some weight from the US to orbit. NASA’s Space Launch System costs a billion dollars a launch. Elon has pioneered a way to reuse rockets that works. NASA had the space shuttle and abandoned it. SpaceX has been to the ISS over twenty times. The Artemis rocket hasn’t been there. SpaceX has launched sixty times so far in 2024. Artemis launched in 2022 and won’t do so again until September 2025. The problem isn’t Elon.
Performance-wise it’s all Elon. NASA hasn’t properly entered the competition up to this point. We made it to the moon because NASA had a sense of urgency that it now lacks. We don’t have to honor the oath of a president who was assassinated anymore. What we need is a boost from someone who actually cares about making progress and not just providing jobs in a given Congressional district. We don’t need to get rid of Musk. We need more of him.
And that’s where I’m hoping the rest of these companies will step up. None of them will probably ever match Musk’s marketing budget. I’m okay with that if they can put people in orbit without it. What we need is someone who can build a space company that pushes Musk harder or maybe even knocks him out of the top spot. The “evils of modern capitalism” are once again going to achieve something that nothing else in history could have. And when it does, the charge won’t be led by some government stooge.