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The world’s most prolific billionaires are becoming further invested in the space industry. But is privatising the space race the right thing to do?
It seems that we’ve entered a new boom era for interstellar exploration. Apparently not content with mere world domination, Amazon founder and official Scrooge McDuck Jeff Bezos is beginning to rival everyone’s favourite memelord, Elon Musk, in the quest to become the billionaire that owns space. This week Bezos unveiled his Blue Moon lunar lander – a funky little craft designed to take people and payloads to the surface of (you guessed it) the moon.
The Blue Moon mission was conducted by Blue Origin, Bezos’ own privately funded Aerospace technology company.
Despite the fanfare that accompanied the event, Bezos is probably the billionaire that keeps quietest about his astronomical achievements. Musk is much more vocal about the numerous successes (and failures) of his own company SpaceX.
SpaceX has launched nearly 70 rockets to date and has won contracts with NASA and the US Air Force. It’s also been responsible for an astonishing number of rockets exploding at launch. So much so that Musk himself put together a complilation of his rockets combusting at launch…
It’s clear that the end goal of these private companies is, eventually, to commercialise space travel. Sir Richard Branson and PayPal founder Peter Thiel have also been clear about their designs on outer space, with Branson declaring space tourism an ‘inevitability’.
But the idea of privatising the space industry has some people nervous. Private businesses clearly have very different motives to government run programs. Whilst NASA’s funding can be directed towards science for science’s sake, commercial businesses have investors and must justify each decision with their bottom line. This means that funds won’t necessarily be directed as democratically as they would be with state run institutions. All this is purely academic, of course, if the state funds for space travel continue to be cut.
So, is it a good thing that we allow billionaires to be the first pioneers of the final frontier?
Private vs Public
The role of the government in space exploration is to execute missions that the market can’t support, but that the people agree are beneficial. When we send a spacecraft like New Horizons to take close-up pictures of Pluto we do so because, as people, we understand science’s role in satiating basic human curiosity. We understand that knowledge has value for its own sake and that often we can’t predict ahead of time how this knowledge might have practical applications in the future.
This kind of exploration is strictly the realm of public sector as there isn’t a way to make a guaranteed return on investment. Imagine how the Hubble Telescope would work if it was privately funded. A commercial entity would need a way to recoup the cost spent making the telescope, and so would likely start charging researchers to use it, and demand royalties for the use of information gained through the telescope’s findings.
This means that the more than 14,000 scientific papers and 1.3 million celestial discoveries resulting from the telescope would have been a lot harder to create.
Instead, the representatives of the American tax payer (politicians) decided that each citizen of the nation would pay $1.60 a year to put this giant telescope into space and operate it, so that researchers around the world could use it at no cost. Teachers can also use its images for their classrooms at no cost, and we can all marvel at the wonders of our universe. Also, an early warning system for any signs of approaching Thanos’ isn’t to be sneezed at…
So why don’t we just nationalise space?
Well, the trouble with relying on the public sector to make humanity an interplanetary species is that not everyone agrees space exploration is a good way to spend the federal budget. Trump’s most recent 2020 budget proposal cancels not one but three NASA science missions: the Wide-Field Infrared Survey (WFIRST) and two Earth science missions.
Though the new budget request does include $10.7 billion for NASA’s ‘exploration campaign’, these figures are never static, and are constantly subject to the whims of new administrations. NASA, the European Space Agency, and every national aerospace research agency, in fact, has experienced the frustration of almost completing a project only for it to be axed last minute.
Unlike public servants, however, billionaires are only beholden to the demands of the market, and to their own whims. This makes the private sector a far less stable but potentially more productive field. If Musk, Bezos, and Branson decide to funnel money into risky ventures, then the likelihood of their companies progressing quicker goes up. And this is exactly how things have played out.
The years 2006, 2007, 2008, and 2016 all saw a huge and costly explosions of SpaceX rockets. Further, Musk’s 2018 launch of a Falcon 9 rocket involved a spy satellite that detached and was destroyed. Were these failures to have occurred under a state funded institution, the calls to cut funds would have been deafening. But as a private organism, SpaceX can get up and dust itself off to try again the next day. Due to this persistence, the company has now successfully landed 16 rockets, with one 2017 Falcon 9 launch making it into space to deploy a satellite before successfully making the landing.
Like it or not, if anyone has the means to weather a money sink until cheaper, reusable rockets are viable for wide production, it’s these guys.
