What He Said

Matt Yglesias has a sensible post about space exploration. He quotes President Kennedy, who said:

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

Matt responds:

These analogies aren’t crazy reasons for doing things, but they do seem like odd reasons for public-sector endeavors. Rice plays Texas for honor, but also because people will buy tickets to the game, watch it on television, etc . . . football rivalries are entertaining spectacles financed by the people who find them entertaining. Mallory joined the Alpine Club to pursue his passion for mountain-climbing, he didn’t get a job at the Royal Mountaineering Agency.

I’m not one of these “open outer space to more private-sector activity and we’ll have colonies on Titan in seven weeks” people but it does seem to me that there’s probably a sufficient mix of legitimate commercial uses for space and rich eccentric space enthusiasts (and, of course, there’s the intersection of the two: providing space-related commercial services to wealthy eccentrics) to keep human activity going out there without giant subsidies to the aerospace industry. A general public-sector pullback from outer space in favor of NGOs and business enterprises would be a natural corollary to the principle of outer space as international ad demilitarized. The Bush administration, in keeping with longstanding Air Force priorities, seems more inclined in the opposite direction.

I haven’t given it a lot of thought, but I think there’s something to be said for the “open outer space to more private-sector activity and we’ll have colonies on Titan in seven weeks” position. Or at least that we could do a lot more with a lot less if we had more competition. Government projects routinely cost more than their private-sector alternatives, and this tendency is greatly exacerbated when there’s no private sector to pioneer cost-saving measures. In the military, that gives us $600 toilet seats and $2 billion bombers. In NASA, you get a ludicrously expensive space station, an over-priced, under-performing space shuttle, and plans to spend tens of billions of dollars on a new boondoggle space plane when the shuttle is retired.

My guess is that if you had a private, competitive space industry, you’d see incremental but steady cost savings over the course of a decade or two. As the cost dropped, space tourism would become affordable to more and more rich people. That, in turn, would allow economies of scale to drive down costs even further. I don’t think it’s crazy to think that in the long run, getting stuff into space would wind up costing a small fraction of what NASA currently spends.

SHARE: