It's Almost Launch Time

And I'm Excited. Maybe. Possibly.

Photo by Roland Horváth on Unsplash

If things go as planned, and this is the real world, Artemis II will launch tonight. This is a big one. The flight is scheduled to circle the moon with four astronauts aboard. It will be the first time we’ve had a manned mission that close to the moon since 1972.

That blows my mind. I have no grandchildren of my own, but both of my younger sisters do. That was four years before I was born. That’s how long it’s been in life terms as opposed to just referring to the number of years that have passed. It’s easier to really digest the amount of time that way.

On one hand, I really am praying for a successful mission. I mean that sincerely. I pray for the safety of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Cook, and Jeremy Hansen. I also pray that they get to look out of the window (or whatever the official term is), look down on the moon and feel the same sense of wonder that a Science Fiction fan like myself would.

I want to watch as humanity circles that giant block of cheese in the sky. NASA actually has the technology to live stream it and send pictures back in seconds. They can send a wireless signal from the moon to Earth in less than a second and a half. Downloading a picture may take a bit longer but we should be getting pictures back less than ten seconds after the moon comes into view. I hope. There’s no excuse for us not to. The American people spent the billions. We deserve at least that much.

I hope those four astronauts step out of the capsule and into a hero’s welcome the likes of which have not been seen in the United States since 1945. I mean that seriously. Our abandonment of deep space exploration, and its attendant emphasis on science and industry, in favor of paying people to stay home and not work has done more to damage American society than Hitler and Tojo combined. It’s time to become a country that achieves again.

And yet…

NASA is planning a moon base. I’m for a base on the moon in general terms. It’s the first step into the universe. First the moon, then Mars. With Space-X bringing the cost of orbital transport down, we could legitimately be looking at space based industry and mining. Smelting ore in orbit would definitely cut down on the cost of bringing it back into the atmosphere. And if someone can actually build a functional space elevator (and spaces elevators are, at best, an unproven concept at the moment) it gets even less expensive. Humanity, as a species, is close to achieving something monumental right now. We’re looking at a higher standard of living for everyone (or at least everyone who is willing to participate) on the planet.

And the dumbest possible thing we could do is trust government with it. And by government, I don’t just mean Fedgov. I mean every government. And, by all that I hold holy and sacred, I’m definitely including the United Nations in the list of “governments” that have no business being in charge of space. The bigger the organization, the more corruption that exists within it and the UN covers the entire world.

What we need to do is follow the method used to establish the colonies of Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island, Virginia, and Connecticut: We need to charter corporations to do the work. Yes, I’m serious. Let’s look at the facts:

First off, here are the reasons we should not trust the governments: The Holocast, The Holodomor, the Armenian massacre at the end of World War I, the Great Leap Forward and the Khmer Rouge’s death factories were all conducted by government. So was literally every war. Whenever governments are involved with anything, mass death follows. That’s true of every form of government with which I am familiar.

The scariest part of government control of space habitats is that there is no effective way to control a government, short of the type of of violence the Founding Fathers used to get rid of George III and the Union used to dispose of the Confederacy. Space settlers aren’t likely to be able to project that kind of force from the moon, Mars, the asteroid belt or wherever else they are. An angry enough government could easily stop shipments of oxygen and food and put down any disagreement quickly. It’s not hard to picture. At least with a corporation we have the government as a weapon to use against them. What’s Elon Musk going to do if he gets upset at someone in the government and they tell him to get bent? Sue them? Tell me how that goes.

The only way for colonists to protect themselves from a denial of supplies is to become self sufficient. And, while I’m not delusional enough to think that such a thing would be easy, I also know that government is not the way to become economically independent. Think about it this way.

NASA was founded in 1958, eighteen years before I was born. Painfully simple math will tell you that they’ve had sixty-eight years to bring costs down. Space-X was founded in 2002. I turned twenty-six that year. They’ve had twenty-four years to figure out the engineering and bring down costs. And according to a NASA document:

The major impression given by Figure 1 is of two large initial and recent cost drops with a long intermediate period of more constant cost. Three early systems had launch costs to LEO above $100 k/kg, even approaching $1,000 k/kg. Vanguard was the first and by far most expensive launch system. Costs dropped rapidly to the Saturn V used for Apollo, which still has the lowest historical cost except for three Soviet systems and the two recent Falcons. Vanguard’s launch cost was about 170 times that of the Saturn V.

The average launch cost did not change much from 1970 to 2000, especially since many systems with initial flight before 2000 continue to be used. From 1970 to 2000 the average launch cost was $18.5 k/kg, with a typical range of $10 to $32 k/kg. Of the 22 systems initially launched from 1970 to 2000, only 7 have costs below $10 k/kg, Vanguard Shuttle Falcon 9 Falcon Heavy Saturn V International Conference on Environmental Systems 3 and they are all Soviet or Chinese and their cost may be subsidized. Only 2 systems have costs above $32 k/kg, the shuttle at $61.7 k/kg and the small and costly Pegasus.

A major drop in cost occurred in 2010 with the Falcon 9 at $2.7 k/kg. The Falcon Heavy reduces the cost to $1.4 k/kg. Shuttle’s launch cost was about 20 times that of the Falcon 9 and about 40 times that of the Falcon Heavy. The average 1970 to 2000 launch cost of $18.5 k/kg is reduced by a factor of 7 for the Falcon 9 and and 13 for the Falcon Heavy. (Costs from Appendix A are in 2018 dollars. Some differ from unadjusted costs in the abstract.)

Falcon Heavy is thirteen times less expensive than the Space Shuttle. That’s not per some partisan website. I didn’t get that quote from SpaceX or Elon Musk. That’s information straight from NASA. Elon Musk has stated that Starship will bring the cost of sending a pound of cargo into low earth orbit down to what it costs to ship a one pound package from New York to Paris via airmail. That’s currently between $12 and $30 a pound. To be fair, the price in kilograms (as NASA used in their documents) would come out to closer to $27-67 a kilogram. That’s assuming that Musk can deliver on his promises, a premise which remains unproven.

The only way to establish a viable colony anywhere off of Earth is to make it profitable. Profitability happens after costs are covered. Anything that is profitable is self-sustaining by definition. The only way to make an extraplanetary expedition profitable is to have a corporation run it.

And listen, I’m not sure how that works. Space tourism? Sending back rocks and dirt as keepsakes? Mining? A fueling station on the moon might be enough to get some profit going if it was run intelligently. Ditto if it’s on/in orbit around Mars if people are trying to make it back and forth from the asteroid belt. Then again, my degree is in history and that’s a problem for the marketing department.

The fact remains that they only way to establish something and keep it from becoming a drag on the government budget and the economy in general is for it to make money. And for that to happen, we need to keep government as far away from the projects as possible.